Last week I went to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the Edgar Degas Ballet Exhibition. Not only is the Royal Academy a lovely place to visit but the exhibition is quite something – known as the ‘Painter of Dancers’ Degas was a founding member of the impressionist group.
The exhibition explores Degas’ fascination with movement and the grace of ballet dancers, through the most wonderful pictures and sculptures created during his career. What is remarkable is the sheer volume of paintings, sculptures and sketches most showing the motion and range of movement the dancers were put through in dance classes and rehearsals.
Degas’s most famous sculpture, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is at the centre of one of the galleries. Surrounding the sculpture are the 20 sketches he created from different viewpoints to make the sculpture. Degas effectively circled round his model sketching whilst she remained still in her pose. The whole exhibition is truly inspiring and definitely worth a visit if you are in London.
These two pictures of dancers in Blue (via www.edgar-degas.org) I find particularly alluring and in person the blue tone is incredibly striking.
Which reminded me of the below interiors
Images via Elle Decor, Eclectic Revisited and Architizer
Oh, I love Degas… always have! Being a dancer, he's painters are especially interesting to me. The exhibit sounds like it was wonderful!
(Thank you for the comment on my blog, by the way.)
Hilary you would have LOVED the exhibition. It really was glorious. Thank goodness it was also easy to get up close and look at the detail as the Royal Academy kept the numbers down.