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Degas excelled in depicting dancers while performing 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 and the faces are not well defined.
Here he worked with oil paint laid on canvas to establish the general outlines and reinforce certain details, blocked in color 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: 74.00x 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 wealthy family and was the oldest of five children.
By the time he graduated in literature at age 18, he had turned his room in 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 almost 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 as a reference in some of his own sketches.

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 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. In spite of this, 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 different styles, his dynamic paintings and sketches of ordinary life 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 with the simplest and 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 preferred to portray ballet 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 while posing; 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 preferred studying and looking 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 slightly faded, just 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