When Edgar Degas painted Fan Mount: Ballet Girls in 1879, he was responding to a Parisian craze for decorative fans, a trend that swept through the city in the late 19th century and attracted artists from Impressionism and beyond. Unlike his more famous oil paintings of dancers, this work was intended as a design for a functional object—yet, intriguingly, no finished fan is known to exist. The piece stands as a rare experiment, blending the practical with the painterly, and reflects Degas’s fascination with Japanese art, which often featured fans as both motif and medium. At the center of the composition, a group of young ballet dancers gathers in rehearsal, their tutus forming a soft arc that echoes the fan’s curved shape.

Degas captures them in a moment of preparation: some adjust their ribbons, others stretch or converse, their gestures natural and unposed. The pastel hues and loose brushwork evoke the fleeting quality of movement and light, while the unusual format forces the viewer’s eye to sweep across the scene, much as one would open a fan. Unlike Renoir’s more sentimental depictions of dancers, Degas’s approach here is observational—intimate but unsentimental, focusing on the discipline and camaraderie of the ballet studio. The exact medium of Fan Mount: Ballet Girls remains uncertain, though it is likely pastel or watercolor on paper, in keeping with Degas’s experiments of the period.

The work was never mounted as a fan, and its early history is not well documented; it survives today as a sheet, preserved in a museum collection. This piece marks a moment when Degas was exploring new formats and techniques, pushing the boundaries of what constituted a finished artwork. It stands as a testament to his restless creativity and his ongoing dialogue with both the decorative arts and the world of the Paris Opéra.