About this artwork
Degas made The Star between 1879 and 1881, at the height of his involvement with the ballet. He was in his mid-forties, living in Montmartre, and painting the dancers of the Paris Opera almost exclusively. The Star is one of his most celebrated ballet works, and it is also one of the most technically innovative: it is a pastel drawn over a monotype, a process that Degas invented and used in only a handful of works.
The painting shows a single dancer on stage, caught in a moment of pose. She wears a green ribbon and a tutu, and she is bending forward, one arm extended behind her, the other raised. Behind her, a group of dancers in dark dresses waits in the wings. The stage is painted in a warm, golden light, with the floorboards visible beneath the dancer's feet. The composition is cropped from the left and the bottom, as if the viewer is standing at the edge of the stage, looking in.
Degas had been painting the ballet since the 1860s, but his approach changed in the late 1870s. He gained access to the backstage areas of the Paris Opera through a friend, the cellist Desiré Dihau, who played in the orchestra. This gave him entry to the rehearsal rooms, the dressing rooms, and the wings of the stage, where he could observe the dancers in their unguarded moments. The Star is one of the paintings that came from this access: it shows the dancer not in a formal performance, but in a moment between movements, caught in the light of the stage.
The pastel-over-monotype technique that Degas used for The Star was one of his most radical experiments. He began by making a monotype: a painting on a metal plate, pressed onto paper to produce a single, reversed print. The monotype gave him a dark, smeared background, which he then worked over with pastel, building the dancer and the stage in layers of bright, dry color. The combination of the dark, fluid monotype and the bright, powdery pastel gives the painting a quality that no other medium could produce: the background seems to dissolve into darkness, while the dancer emerges from it in a burst of light.
Pastel on monotype, 73 by 57 centimeters. Degas built the dancer in short, directional strokes of pastel, with the tutu described in layers of white and blue. The green ribbon is a single, thick stroke of bright green. The stage floor is painted in warm browns and yellows, with the floorboards suggested by the direction of the strokes. The background dancers are barely indicated, painted in dark, blurry strokes that dissolve into the monotype's dark ground.
The vertical format and warm palette make this print work well in a living room, bedroom, or hallway. The warm golds, greens, and whites pair with white walls, natural wood, and rooms with a warm or elegant mood. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the dancer room to read. The painting has a luminous, theatrical quality that suits rooms with a dramatic or romantic mood.
The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1933, as part of the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.
This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
