We look slightly down onto a loosely painted scene with three ballerinas in rose-pink costumes and one man, wearing a black suit and top hat, against a backdrop made up of dabs and strokes of lime, mint, and pine green in this vertical painting. The people all appear to have light skin.
   The most defined person is the woman closest to us, shown from the knees up to the right of center. Her body is angled to our left, and her profile faces that direction. Dark eyelashes suggest her eyes are closed. She has a pointed nose, and her red lips are closed. Dark brown hair is pulled up into a large bun with a coral-pink flower tucked in at the back of her head. She grips opposite elbows at her waist, her arms close to her body. Her pink costume has a low-cut bodice with loops low over her shoulders and a flaring, knee-length tutu. She wears a black choker tied with a bow at the back of her neck and two black bands encircle her wrists. A touch of white at the ear we can see suggests a gold earring.
   To our right and cut off by the right edge of the painting, a man stands beyond the woman’s shoulder, in shadow as he looks onto the scene. His face is painted with taupe-gray strokes. His suit and top hat are black except for a narrow white collar at his neck. Beyond this pair and seen from the chest up between them, another woman in the same pink costume faces our right. A short distance from us to our left, a third ballerina stands facing away from us. The elephant-gray floor she stands on visually creates a vertical band up the left side of the composition. The rest of the space behind and around the man and dancers is painted loosely with shades of vibrant to muted greens, with a few dabs of pale pink. The painting has a narrow sand-brown border. The artist signed the work by incising into the green paint in the upper right corner, “Degas.”

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   Dancers Backstage depicts an informal, behind-the-scenes moment at the ballet—the type of scene that most intrigued Degas. Four figures occupy the painting: a dancer who stands onstage with her back to the viewer and a group of three figures—two dancers and a man in black evening clothes—who stand just offstage behind a painted stage flat.

   The interaction between the man and the dancer to his left is the fulcrum of the composition. The man’s attire marks him as an abonné, one of the wealthy male subscribers to the Paris Opéra. Accorded the privilege of backstage access, the abonnés often lurked in the wings while productions were under way and flirted with the young dancers. There can be no mistaking the man’s intentions toward the woman beside him. In response, the dancer has turned away, her stance—head tilted down and arms folded—suggesting indifference.

   Given its modest scale and rapidly painted surface, Dancers Backstage may have been intended as a sketch for a larger work. No such work was ever executed, however, and it is equally possible that Degas considered this jewel-like painting fully realized. He showed it to great acclaim in 1881 at the sixth impressionist exhibition.

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