For a brief period in 1926–1927, Matisse departed from portraying odalisques to undertake an extended series of images of dancers. In some ways, his work recalls the ballet dancers of Edgar Degas who carefully observed the ballerinas every pose and dance step and occupied himself with their lives on and off stage. But Matisse’s dancers were not on the stage—they were models dressed as dancers so that the artist could observe them in his studio. While the impressive lithograph exhibited here approaches the pictorial complexity of the painting, numerous other lithographs by Matisse follow the model through a range of poses and attitudes to comprise a series of variations on a theme.