Four Dancers, 1903 by Edgar Degas
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Many of Degas' late works in pastel are more painted than drawn. He now used coat after coat of colored chalk, moistening them and piling up one surface on a nother until these works take on something of the quality of miniature frescoes. No longer are outlines and contours stressed; Degas goes back to the deep, sonorous colors of the Venetians, rather than to the Florentine draftsmen whom he earlier loved.
Such a pastel with its rich, brooding color expresses a new, passionate feeling in the artist. Nothing is more surprising than this final burst of romantic force in a man who had coolly spent most of his life in a search for classical perfection. As he intensified his composition, as he bent and dissected his drawing and heaped up crushed, jewel-like color upon color, Degas became, at the end of his career, a modern artist who through his Expressionism influenced both Bonnard and Rouault and many of the more creative colorists of our own day.