The world of dance offered Degas seemingly limitless possibilities in the study and rendering of the human body as observed in a singularly perfect mode of expression. Well-practiced in the training and discipline of the ballet arts, lithe and agile women in the flower of youth moved with unsurpassed elegance and refinement, against the background of extravagant and fanciful sets. There was, within this same milieu, the opportunity for Degas to view his favorite subjects in casual, less glamorous moments, when the artist liked to take note of the young women as they were standing about or resting from their work, in situations which he found to be even more fascinating in their visual aspect than the actual performances themselves.

The present pastel drawing, Buste de danseuse au corsage rouge, records a scene of the latter kind, describing a sharply characterized moment in the daily life of a dancer behind the scenes, such as one that may have caught Degas' attention during a dress rehearsal at the Opéra de Paris. Degas drew this work in 1899, while entering the late phase of his career, when he was moving away from evocations of the dance in its formal grandeur and pageantry as public performance, and from there—as it were—into the stage wings, dans les coulisses, looking for novel and inventive ways to present the varied activities in the lives of the dancers as only a knowledgeable insider like himself could reveal. He now focused on the dancers as individuals, viewed close-up in unconventionally cropped formats, depicted in those more familiar and unstudied moments when he might finally "know the dancer from the dance," to borrow from the final line of a late poem by W.B. Yeats. Scenes such as that represented in the present work are revealingly informal snapshots of the real daily work at the Opéra; they display a vitality and immediacy that lend these late works their particularly modern sensibility.