Degas developed an interest in ballet at an early age and in 1872 he made his first studies of ballet dancers. He avoided the true drama, the performance itself. This distant approach seems a reflection of Degas’ own life. When one of his favourite models went to New York, the apparently uninterested bachelor followed her, sailing on the next boat only to return to France never having left the ship, exclaiming: ‘What more can we do than to show that one is able to follow a lady from Paris to New York?’