Shinn’s and Kronberg’s works that feature dancers backstage place the viewer in the
dancer’s position. The artists grant the viewer access to a world hidden from the audience by the
curtains and backdrops. However, despite this intimate setting, the dancers remain things of beauty
rather than individuals—two of the dancers in Shinn’s Ballet Girls are literally faceless. Although the
dancers may be captured in unflattering poses, they are far from unattractive. The liberal
application of paint creates a luscious and sensuous quality; the dancers glow against the darker
backgrounds. Paintings, like Shinn’s In the Wings and Ballet Girls, that simultaneously portray the
dancers on and offstage, do convey the fact that performing on stage entails a lot of preparation and
boredom, but it is a romanticized boredom, one that is still very much caught up in the glamour of
the footlights.