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Degas received his classicistic training from Louis Lamothe, a follower of the famous Ingres. But, as he belonged to Manet's generation, he converted to a "peintre de la vie moderne", as Charles Baudelaire had called for it programmatically. Henceforth, he searched for typical contemporary motifs, studied social events such as men and horses at races, for instance. After 1870, Degas extended his repertory by discovering the ballet for himself, particularly the graceful danseuses. In a vast number of drawings, he captured their different dancing figures and poses, observed them while practicing, while resting, on the stage, behind the scenes and while making their toilet. Besides horses and riders, they were also the theme of a lot of his small sculptures. When he was asked, why he painted so often dancers, Degas answered remarkably, that he could find only in them the movements of the ancient Greeks. By which he regarded himself as a modern painter, who did not deny his classicistic education.

Around 1880, Degas turned his back on the plein-air painting because of a eye disease. With the use of pastel crayons for his pictures, he took up particularly a tradition of the French rococo, with which technique he obtained outstanding results. Other important artists, which painted with pastel crayons too, were Renoir and Lenbach. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard bequeathed that Degas exposed his pastel crayons to the sun before using them to dry them up and to gain hereby more luminous power. With this crayon, he was able to reproduce virtuously the artificially colourful footlights, which illuminate particularly the white dancing skirts. It is captivating how Degas knows to paint the two danseuses — for which a preliminary sketch is preserved too — in the sea-green light behind the scenes. While one of them is fanning herself with a fan, the other one seems to memorize a particular pose — perhaps from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.