Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement

Degas and the Ballet – Picturing Movement at The Royal Academy of Arts is a collection of the French artists painting, photographs and sculptors.

Born in 1834 in Paris, Degas was known in his lifetime as the ‘Painter of Dancers’. He once claimed that his ballet scenes were ‘a pretext for depicting movement’.

Some of his first pictures to attract attention were scenes of the ballet.

He went on to transform his vision of movement into his celebrated sculpture, The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. It was made of wax and dressed in real clothes and a wig.

Around 1915, Degas came face to face with the new medium of film, and even though he refused for him and his work to be filmed, director Sacha Guitry captured an almost blind Degas, as he walked past the camera.

Within two years Degas was bedridden and died in 1917, during the First World War. Soon after his works were acquired by major museums, such as the National Gallery in London. This is the biggest collection of his work to be in one place since his death.

This exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts, is a real mixture of all the different styles of expressing art and all the influences that inspired Degas to create some of the most stunning images of dance and movement that has ever been seen.

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