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Edgar Degas, an outstanding portraitist and observer of the Parisian vie moderne, was also an obsessive painter of the female body. His images of ballet dancers alone number about 600, and the nudes, particularly the bathers, that dominate his late work are no less numerous. This text examines these two aspects of the artist's oeuvre. A wealth of carefully chosen illustrations provide a multi-faceted survey of Degas' ballet dancers, on stage, at rehearsal, or in their dressing rooms, and of his nudes washing and drying themselves, or combing their hair. Lillian Schaerl rejects the interpretation of these images as voyeuristic by the moralists among Degas' contemporaries and by some present-day viewers. The artist's intention, she argues, was not to glorify the glamourous world of ballet, or to revel in the beauty of the female form, but to capture classically perfect movement and spontaneous, unselfconscious gesture, preserving such moments for posterity. In their perfect synthesis of classical values and more modern artistic concerns, Schacherl argues that Degas' ballet dancers and late nudes constitute one of the undisputed peaks of 19th-century art.
