This painting probably depicts a single dancer seen from four different viewpoints. The young woman is placed in an undefined setting, surrounded by mere wisps of color, applied so spontaneously that the paint ran and dripped. Degas even added the circles in the foreground with his thumb. Such audacity, while acceptable in a small sketch, must have shocked the artist's contemporaries when presented on a six-foot canvas. Equally radical is the idea of combining multiple views of a single figure, an approach that violated the traditional notion that a painting must represent a unity of time, place, and viewpoint. Degas's unusual presentation may have been inspired by the work of British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)