Degas’s Late Masterpiece Emerges from the Hammer Collection

Yellow skirts catch light like stage lamps. In Edgar Degas’s Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes), three figures gather in a moment of theatrical suspension, their forms dissolved into gesture and colour rather than rendered with academic precision. This late work, executed when the artist’s vision had turned inward and his technique had become almost abstract in its freedom, captures the informal energy of dancers before their entrance—a subject Degas returned to throughout his career, yet here transformed into something far more immersive and sensory.

The Hammer Years

The painting has resided in the Armand Hammer Collection for 55 years, sheltered within one of the twentieth century’s most influential American private assemblies. Now it emerges for the first time into public auction, where it will be offered as part of The Modern Evening Auction in partnership with Celine.

A Shift in Vision

By the time Degas painted this composition, his eyesight had deteriorated considerably, yet his artistic vision had only grown more radical. Where his earlier ballet scenes presented observed moments of Parisian theatrical life, his late works embrace colour and movement as ends in themselves. Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) distils years of observation into something that feels almost visionary: the yellow garments dominate the canvas not as costume but as pure sensation, surrounding the dancers in an immersive field of light and energy.

The work reflects the particular alchemy of Degas's mature practice, when he moved beyond straightforward figuration into territory that anticipates twentieth century abstraction. His long engagement with the ballet had given him such profound knowledge of movement and form that he could dispense with literal representation and work instead with the essential registers of colour, composition and gesture.

On View

The painting is now on view at the Breuer in New York through 18 November ahead of the auction. This public presentation allows collectors and scholars to encounter the work directly, to understand how Degas's late vision translates across canvas and time, and to appreciate what drew the Hammer Collection to preserve it for half a century.

Free tickets to the exhibition are available through Sotheby's official channels. The Modern Evening Auction takes place at Sotheby's New York.

Key Facts

• Artist: Edgar Degas
• Title: Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes)
• Provenance: Armand Hammer Collection (55 years)
• Exhibition: On view at the Breuer, New York, through 18 November
• Sale: The Modern Evening Auction, Sotheby's New York, presented in partnership with Celine

The Simply Luxury View

For collectors of museum quality Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, the emergence of a major late Degas from a celebrated private collection represents a significant moment. The Hammer Collection was assembled with considerable rigour and expertise; that this painting remained within it for five and a half decades underscores both its quality and its rarity.

Degas’s late works occupy a particular place in his oeuvre. Less widely circulated than his earlier ballet scenes and café compositions, they represent his most experimental period, when technique and vision had achieved an almost prophetic synthesis. Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) exemplifies that mature freedom—a work that resonates as powerfully with contemporary collectors as it did with the collector who first acquired it.

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