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Degas excelled in depicting dancers in performance or as here, at moments of ease. For this painting he chose an off-centre grouping with the dancers chatting in a corner of the rehearsal room. Part of a ballet skirt is reflected in the mirror in the background. Here he worked with oil paint to establish the general outlines and reinforce certain details, blocked in colour with broad brush strokes and used his fingers, leaving fingerprints in the paint surface. He produced over 1500 images connected with the ballet.

Title: A Group of Dancers

Artist: Edgar Degas

Gallery: Scottish National Gallery

Materials: Oil on paper laid on canvas

Date created: About 1898

Measurements: 46.00 x 61.20 cm (framed: 74.00 x 89.30 x 13.50 cm)

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Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French artist famous for his paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints.
He is usually identified with the subject of "dance" because in more than half of his works are portrayed dancers.
He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, as he preferred to be called a realist.

His Life
Degas was born in 1834 in Paris, France, into a moderately wealthy family and was the oldest of five children.
By the time he graduated in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned his room an artist's studio. When he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1855, he never forgot the advice the man gave him: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."
Consequently in April of that exact year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and this was only the beginning of his career.
As he grew up, he started improving and became immediately well - known; shortly afterwards he joined a group of young artists who soon became known as the Impressionists. Between 1874 and 1886 they organized eight art shows, known as the Impressionist Exhibitions. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all of them.
As his financial situation improved through the sales of his own work, he was able to collect some works by artists he admired: El Greco, Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier.
As the years passed he also developed a passion for sculptures and, in the late 1880s, for photography (some of his shots depicting dancers and nudes were actually used for reference in some of his own drawings and paintings).

Artistic style
Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, "dazzling" colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy. They wanted to express their visual experience in that exact moment.

Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists because of his practice of painting en plein air. Nonetheless, he is described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement: his scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several Impressionist artists - such as Monet - all relate him to that movement.
Degas was influenced by lots of different artistic styles and as his subject of his interest changed, so did his technique: for example, as his interest for photography grew, he started cropping the visual in his paintings just like a photographer would do.

Degas is now considered one of the founders of Impressionism but, even though his work is full of many styles, his dynamic paintings and sketches of everyday life and activities and his color experiments couldn't help people associating him to any other movement.

The Ballerinas
Degas’s contemporaries saw something more in his work. Daniel Halévy described it as a “depoetization” of life, a fascination with the simplest, most intimate, least beautiful gestures — such as ballerinas stretching at the bar, practicing positions, waiting in the wings, taking instruction, tying their shoes, adjusting their tutus, rubbing sore muscles, fixing their hair, fanning, talking, flirting, daydreaming, and, sometimes, dancing. Degas’s pictures of ballerinas performing onstage convey exquisitely what makes ballet ballet—all that balance, grace and radiance that a contemporary critic called “mimed poetry, dream made visible.” But, paradoxically, Degas preferred to portray ballet by stripping away the poetry and illusion to show the hard work, the boredom, the more common beauty behind the scenes.
Degas enjoyed the company of these dancers, who shared gossip with him as they posed; he also used to say: “You must know what a dancer is like who wants you to put in a word for her".
However, sometimes he also preferred watching and studying them from the backstage or from the staircases, just to give the spectator of his work a different perspective of the scene.
Degas would surely have loved to see these dancers at work on a ballet inspired by his creation; he wrote to a friend “ (...) even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.”

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Information:
https://art.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/4813

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Degas

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/degas-and-his-dancers-79455990/

Degas' self-portrait and the sketch in the background:
http://www.libercogitatio.org/arte/edgar-degas.html