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One of the nineteenth century’s most innovative artists, Edgar Degas often combined traditional techniques in unorthodox ways. In Ballet at the Paris Opéra, the artist creatively joined the monotype technique, rarely used in his time, with the fragile medium of pastel. Described as “the powder of butterfly wings,” pastel was the perfect medium to illustrate the onstage metamorphosis of spindly young dancers into visions of beauty as perfect and short-lived as butterflies. This work, executed on one of the widest monotype plates ever used by the artist, bears Degas’s characteristically cropped forms and odd vantage points, which effectively convey the immediacy of the scene. The view is from the orchestra pit, with the necks of the double basses intruding into the dancers’ zone. The central dancer is in fifth position, en pointe, but the random placement of the corps de ballet, with the dancers’ free-flowing hair, suggests a rehearsal rather than a performance. The Paris Opéra was the official school of the first state-supported ballet, the Académie Royale de Danse, created in 1661.

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The Millinery Shop is the largest of Edgar Degas’s paintings focused on milliners, or hatmakers. He arranged the composition carefully, making multiple drawings and pastels of the lone figure, perfecting the woman’s pose and experimenting with her outfit. The final composition highlights the visual ambiguities of class identity that arose in France in the late nineteenth century. The woman sits in a hat shop examining a wide-brimmed hat. She wears a fashionable green wool dress with long, elegant gloves that were just as likely to be worn by wealthy clients as by the employees of the shop. At the time, millinery work was considered a prestigious trade that required skill and taste, incrementally elevating the young women who succeeded in the business. Degas addressed this subtle shift in the class hierarchy through the subject’s fashion: While her dress is nice enough to be worn by an affluent woman, she does not wear a hat of her own, which would have been expected of a high-class young lady. The artist portrayed this newfound uncertainty playfully by positioning the hat with green trimmings so it seems to sit atop the woman’s head.

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