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Interrelationship of the arts occurs because artists share the same purpose; the revelation of values and this sharing encourages their interaction (Martin & Jacobus, 2007). The relatively equal combination of two or more artistic forms as seen by the painter and sculpture Edgar Degas spent a great deal of his life producing great works of art depicting ballet dancers. He was born in 1834 to a wealthy Franco-Italian banking family, consequently he was not among the starving artists of his time and he had the freedom to pursue his vocation unencumbered by debt. He had the unfailing support of his family. He was a shy, insecure, aloof young man whose self portrait depicted a veiled look of mannerist inwardness, devoid of narcissism unlike the works of his contemporary 19th century painters. He gave up his face for other faces that fascinated him, ballet dancers in particular.

Nothing escaped his eye for the texture of life and the gestures that reveal class and work. He is often considered an Impressionist but his work sometimes goes in the more classical and realist direction in which he was trained. Five of the six rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to Degas depict the theme of ballet. As a matter of fact, he did about six hundred images of ballet dances during his life time. He made art from things that no other artist had used before; the way a discarded dress, still warm from the naked body, keeps some of the shape of the wearer, the unconcern of a dancer, scratching her back between practice sessions, the tension between two dancers, stage performers and dancers in their dressing rooms.