
Lucia Tro Santafe
International Senior Specialist
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International Senior Specialist
Provenance
Fritz Gross Collection, London; thence by descent to the present owner.
This work was intended as an illustration to the catalogue of an exhibition organised by Les Amis des Arts de Pau, in 1877 in Pau, France. Degas had contributed two paintings to the exhibition and certainly took inspiration from one of them, Ballet at the Paris Opéra (pastel over monotype, 1877, The Art Institute of Chicago) for this print, here in its final version after two previously aborted attempts (Sur la scène I and Sur la scène II).
The artist successfully emphasizes the spatial relationship between the orchestra and the stage by drawing the tips of two double basses in the lower left corner and the cropped musicians' faces in the foreground. Although made after his painting, Degas here fully exploits the properties of various intaglio techniques to translate the atmosphere and dynamism of the scene with great vibrancy.
It is unclear how many proofs in the fourth state were made but another impression on thick paper is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.