Ballet Scene was still in Degas's studio when he died in 1917, and it was sold at the first of the four posthumous studio sales, the ventes held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris between 1918 and 1919 to disperse the enormous quantity of work Degas had kept back from the market^[1]. Degas sold selectively during his lifetime and retained a great deal of what he made, so the studio sales released a large body of pastels, drawings and sculptures that had never been seen publicly. From the first sale, the pastel passed to the New York dealer Jacques Seligmann, who sold it at auction at the Hotel Plaza in January 1921; it was bought by the dealers Scott and Fowles, who sold it again at the American Art Association in November 1926, when Chester Dale acquired it^[1].

By the 1890s Degas had largely abandoned oil painting in favour of pastel, a shift driven partly by failing eyesight and partly by the medium's directness: the pigment stick is held in the fingers rather than applied with a brush, and it lets colour and drawing happen in the same gesture^[2]. He built up his late pastels in layers of hatched strokes, juxtaposing warm and cool colours so the surface seems to vibrate rather than blend, a technique he developed specifically for pastel and could not have achieved as readily in oil^[1]. Contemporaries and later critics noted that as Degas's sight weakened his colour intensified and his compositions simplified, the pigment applied in freer, bolder strokes that read clearly even at a distance a painter with failing vision would have needed^[2]. Degas was the first artist to exhibit pastels as finished works in their own right rather than preparatory sketches, and remains the only major painter to have built a large body of his most important work in the medium^[2].

In his final decades Degas moved away from the anecdotal detail of his earlier ballet scenes, the ballet masters, mothers and onlookers who populate his pictures of the 1870s, toward compositions built almost entirely around the dancers themselves, seen in loosely grouped clusters without a clear narrator's viewpoint^[1]. He worked increasingly by tracing and reworking earlier drawings rather than from continuous observation, building new groupings out of figures he had drawn years before and rearranging their positions on tracing paper laid over an existing sheet^[1]. This method produced multiple related versions of a single pose, since Degas would trace a composition, then vary the spacing or add figures, so that near-identical dancers recur across different finished pastels from this period.