The Dancer Who Leaves
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 13.
Created with AI, after Edgar Degas, public domain.
The Dancer Who Leaves is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Edgar Degas (1882). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
Degas painted hundreds of dancers, never one leaving the Opera. This one, coat over her tutu, walks out of the stage door in the rain. Given to the dancer herself, it stayed in her family until it was found in 2024 in a house in Normandy.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for $67,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- Venus in Winter, Sandro Botticelli
- The Garden, the Morning After, Hieronymus Bosch
- Storm over the Château d'If, J. M. W. Turner
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
