View Danseuses bleues (Blue Dancers) in its artwork record.
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by Tom Gurney Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on September 28, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Degas Blue Dancers: Introduction
Four blue-costumed dancers crowd together in Edgar Degas's Blue Dancers. Arms curve above and across bodies; pale faces, dark hair and deep blue skirts appear among strokes of warmer color. A reddish vertical at the right checks the swirl of movement. At first glance the women may seem to be turning together, but the picture gives us no clear count or rhythm for a dance. We may be seeing separate performers in a compressed group, or an artist's repeated exploration of related gestures. That ambiguity is part of the picture's appeal. Degas makes us follow forms through overlap and color before we can assign an action to each figure. [1][5]
This page is about the oil painting in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, accession RF 1951 10. The title Blue Dancers also belongs to a different, later pastel in the Pushkin Museum's collection. Many online captions confuse these works because the shared English title is easy to remember and the blue costumes are similar. The Orsay canvas has its own material, dimensions, date history and provenance. Starting with those facts allows the close looking to remain tied to the right object. [1][2]
At a glance
ArtistEdgar Degas
French titleDanseuses bleues
DateAround 1890 in the current Orsay catalogue; specialist and exhibition datings vary
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions85.3 × 75.3 cm
CollectionMusée d'Orsay, Paris, RF 1951 10
AcquisitionGift of Dr. and Mrs. Albert Charpentier to the French national museums, 1951
The present Orsay object record supplies the principal catalogue facts. It dates the oil to about 1890. Michel Schulman's digital catalogue raisonné dates the same canvas to about 1886, while Orsay's 2019 Degas at the Opéra press file labels it about 1893–96. Their dates cannot all be a single exact year. The museum's present date works for the short label; the wider disagreement should be kept visible in any deeper chronology. [1][3][4]
Reading a close group
The dancers fill the available space instead of standing in an open, measured room. Blue fabric runs from one body to the next, so the group looks almost continuous. The eye has to pick out a face, a shoulder and an arm, then test which skirt belongs beneath it. Degas's arrangement slows recognition. It makes the act of seeing the figures part of the viewer's experience. One can enjoy the sweep of blue immediately; finding the distinct bodies takes longer. [1]
The painting's vertical shape reinforces that crowding. The women rise through the field in a column of curving gestures. Their bodies do not form a straight chorus line, and the painting gives only hints of the space beyond them. The right-hand reddish wall or upright edge is particularly useful. It interrupts the blue and gives the group something firm to press against visually. It is also a mark by which the Orsay image can be distinguished from other works called Blue Dancers. [1]
An arm raised overhead may suggest someone fixing a costume or beginning a movement. Another form seems to turn in a different direction. Yet the visible canvas alone does not document a specific rehearsal, dance step or instant backstage. Degas often used dancers as subjects for studies of pose and movement, but this particular painting does not come with an identified performance or named models in the owner record. It is better to describe the gestures and the visual arrangement than to supply a fictional scene around them. [1]
The group also resists a simple account of four simultaneous actions. Similar blue shapes and repeated limbs can make the women appear like stages in one body's movement. That is a possible way of reading Degas's pictorial rhythm, not proof that he used one model four times or intended an early motion study in a literal technical sense. The painting can prompt questions about time precisely because it keeps individual figures and repeated forms in tension. A viewer sees a group and a sequence at once, then moves back and forth between those impressions. [1]
At a distance the blue can seem like one mass. Up close it varies: darker notes pull some folds back, lighter ones bring others forward, and flesh tones interrupt the costume. The eyes move from one small light patch to the next to recover faces and hands. This distribution avoids a single, clearly framed star. Degas gives attention to a cluster of workers within the dance world, although we should not turn a formal choice into evidence of a particular social message he intended. The picture lets several figures share the field. [1]
Color as structure
The blue costumes provide the painting's clearest visual link. Blue repeats across separated bodies, joining them even when a head or arm is partly concealed. Warm passages around the figures, including the red-brown edge at right, set that color into relief. The contrast is more than a decorative opposition. It helps the viewer distinguish an otherwise dense arrangement and gives the eye a path through it: from blue skirt to warm face, back to blue, then outward to the red-brown boundary. [1]
This is an oil painting. That basic fact matters when discussing its surface. The blue is laid in paint on canvas, not rubbed or fixed pastel on paper. Degas used pastel for many dancers, including a separate Blue Dancers in Moscow, but a familiar color effect does not identify a medium. A reader comparing reproductions should look at the owner caption before describing chalk, paper seams or a pastel's powdery texture. Those terms would misidentify the Orsay canvas. [1][2]
Color also complicates the edges of bodies. Where blue areas meet, one dancer can seem to merge with another. In other places a pale arm cuts through the field and restores a figure's direction. These transitions let the painting hover between a legible gathering and a pattern. They are not a failure to finish a set of four portraits. The work's force lies partly in how the eye repeatedly organizes and reorganizes it. With each pass, a gesture previously read as belonging to the whole can become one person's gesture again. [1]
The reddish strip at right can be read as a piece of the venue's architecture, but it also functions as a color stop. Without claiming to reconstruct an exact room from it, we can see how it confines the group. The canvas offers fewer spatial cues than a broad rehearsal room, so color and overlap do more work. The viewer feels close to the dancers, with little room for a conventional distance between spectator and subject. That closeness is a constructed visual effect, not evidence that Degas painted from a seat at this exact position during one recorded event. [1]
Movement without a clear stage
The dancers' raised arms and turned bodies suggest activity before, after or around a performance. None holds a centered pose offered to an audience in the way a solo bow might be presented. The painting is strongest when read through this uncertainty. It lets us watch preparation and movement as a set of bodily choices, while declining to specify which moment of the workday we have entered. The broader ballet dancers page addresses Degas's long engagement with rehearsal and labor; this canvas makes that engagement unusually concentrated through four overlapping figures. [1]
The lack of a fully described stage frees Degas to make the figures answer one another. A bent arm can be read next to a head tilted in a different direction; a blue hem can repeat the curve of another. Such repetitions are difficult to track in a moving performance, where time carries an action away. A painting fixes them so the viewer can compare at leisure. Yet it does not become a diagram. Its gestures keep some of the fleeting character of dance, and the dense paint leaves several possible paths for the eye. [1]
The women can appear graceful because the blue creates a flowing shape. Their raised arms, however, may also call to mind the effort of holding positions or adjusting dress. It is reasonable to let both sensations coexist. The picture does not identify the dancers' feelings or their training status. Nor should an interpretation of labor turn every bent arm into documentary proof of fatigue. What it can show is a subject beyond the perfectly synchronized stage spectacle: bodies near one another, momentarily engaged in gestures that Degas has chosen to combine. [1]
The shared costume color can make the four figures seem interchangeable at first. Look longer and the differences in direction and placement emerge. This is one reason the title, while convenient, is incomplete as a description. “Blue dancers” tells us about garments and a profession; it does not describe the compact design or the red interruption at the edge. The painting asks us to distinguish people through partial glimpses, even while it binds them in a common visual rhythm. [1]
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Degas did not date every stage of work on a painting, and catalogues can revise an attribution of year as related studies and records are reconsidered. For RF 1951 10, the current Orsay entry gives “vers 1890.” The specialist catalogue by Michel Schulman says circa 1886. Orsay's own press file for its 2019 Opéra exhibition gives approximately 1893–96. All three refer to the same oil canvas through title, dimensions and accession. This is a real dating disagreement, not evidence that there are three Orsay oils of identical size. [1][3][4]
An exact year would imply more certainty than these sources allow. It could also invite an invented development story: one work supposedly leading directly into another solely because of a catalogue label. The safer reader account locates the painting within Degas's mature engagement with dancers and says where the owner catalogue currently places it. If a future technical study or archival record narrows the date, this page can be revised. For now, “around 1890” is a label tied to Orsay's present record, not a claim to know the week or season in which Degas laid down the paint. [1][3][4]
The difference matters when comparing the oil with the Pushkin pastel, dated around 1898 by its project record. If one assumes a firm 1886 date for Orsay and a firm 1898 date for Pushkin, the works can be made into a tidy twelve-year progression. The Orsay evidence itself does not support such precision. We can say the works are different and that the Pushkin object is catalogued later, but we should avoid claiming that one directly evolved from the other without a study chain or documentary link. Similar subject and color alone are not a developmental proof. [1][2][3][4]
Not the Pushkin pastel
The Pushkin State Museum's project record lists a Blue Dancers of about 1898 measuring 65 × 65 cm and made in pastel on paper. Orsay's RF 1951 10 is 85.3 × 75.3 cm, an oil on canvas. Both can be discussed as Degas's responses to blue-costumed dancers, but the differences in owner, medium, size and image are decisive. A search-result thumbnail with the short English title is insufficient to identify which one a page or print reproduces. [1][2]
This distinction prevents the qualities of one work from being attributed to the other. Pastel permits direct, dry strokes of color and raises different support and handling questions from oil. The Orsay canvas should be read as a painting, while the Moscow work is a later pastel; their similar blue costumes do not make their materials or histories interchangeable. [1][2]
Other Degas works can have blue dancers or similar French titles too. That repetition is part of his sustained work with a subject, and it is why a museum accession is useful for readers. It offers a stable identifier even when English titles vary in translation or shorten to the same phrase. On this page, Blue Dancers means RF 1951 10 unless another work is named with its separate collection and medium. [1][2]
From Degas's studio to Orsay
The Orsay catalogue records the painting in the first Degas studio sale in Paris in May 1918, lot 72, after the artist's death. It subsequently passed through the Danthon collection and was owned by Dr. and Mrs. Albert Charpentier. They gave it to the French national museums in 1951, initially for the Jeu de Paume. The painting was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. Michel Schulman's catalogue independently crosswalks the studio sale and later ownership to the same accession. [1][3]
The studio sale tells us the work remained in Degas's estate, but it does not establish that he was painting it in 1917 or that he considered it unfinished. Artists can keep works for many reasons. The gallery history after 1951 also should not be confused with the work's creation date. Its presence at the Jeu de Paume and then Orsay is a history of public custody and display, not a sequence of artistic revisions. Keeping those timelines separate prevents a common error in pages about late Degas: treating a posthumous sale as if it dated the marks on the canvas. [1][3]
The 1951 gift brought the painting into a public collection with an identifiable catalogue record. The red edge and four blue-costumed figures match Orsay's reproduction, while the record supplies the medium, dimensions and collection number that an image alone cannot establish. Provenance ties the familiar composition to a particular, documented object. [1]
Looking again
Return to the group and try to follow one dancer at a time. Notice where a blue skirt connects to a torso, where an arm separates from a neighboring shoulder, and where a face briefly interrupts the colored mass. Then look at the group as one shape against the warmer surround. The painting is lively in both modes. It invites the viewer to alternate between people and pattern, between a possible moment of preparation and an arrangement of color on canvas. [1]
The short title cannot settle every question raised by that view. It does not tell us a ballet, a room, a named model or an exact year. The current Orsay catalogue provides a firm identity and medium, while its date remains approximate and other authorities disagree. Those limits leave ample room to look closely without inventing a story. Degas's Orsay Blue Dancers is compelling because four individual figures become a concentrated movement of blue, and then become individuals again under the viewer's patient eye. [1][3][4]
The same patient eye can notice what a reduced web image hides. A small reproduction tends to turn separate painted passages into a smoother field; details of edge and color become harder to judge. That is another reason to use collection records for facts about material and size rather than deducing them from a screen. The Orsay oil is a substantial canvas, taller than it is wide. Its scale helps explain the effect of standing close to an intertwined group instead of surveying small figures at a distance. The record and the image work together: one anchors the object, and the other invites looking. [1]
Artworks directory
A selected index of documented works, combining owner records with entries sampled across Michel Schulman’s digital catalogue raisonné. It is not a complete catalogue. View the full catalogue
Tom Gurney is an art history expert. He received a BSc (Hons) degree from Salford University, UK, and has also studied famous artists and art movements for over 20 years.
Tom has also published a number of books related to art history and continues to contribute to a number of different art websites. You can read more on Tom Gurney here.
by Tom Gurney
