Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed by Edgar Degas in the year 1872. This somewhat introverted portrayal of a dancer was left unfinished in Degas’s studio at the time of his death. The bare preparation layer of her skirt and roughly sketched contours of her arms expose the artist’s process—laying in outlines first and then, working in sections, building half tones to model three-dimensional form. The resulting image is both strikingly modern and quite literally reserved: a work in progress.