Edgar Degas was one of the most obsessive painters of the female body in the entire history of art. He produced some six hundred images of ballet dancers alone, and the nudes that dominate his late work are scarcely less numerous.

The wealth of carefully chosen illustrations in this volume provides a multi-faceted survey of these two aspects of Degas' oeuvre. The iconographical variety of the imagery is complemented by the wide range of media employed by the artist. Oils and pastels, prints and drawings, sculptures - all are included here.

Lillian Schacherl brings to life the world inhabited by these women. She rejects the interpretation of the images as voyeuristic by the moralists among Degas' contemporaries and by some present-day writers. The artist's intention, she argues, was neither to glorify the glamorous world of the ballet nor to revel in the beauty of the female form. Rather, he sought to capture fleeting moments of classically perfect movement and spontaneous, unselfconscious gesture.

The author shows that, in their synthesis of classical values and more modern artistic concerns, Degas' ballet dancers and late nudes constitute one of the peaks of nineteenth-century art.