Focus on Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando and explain the Use of color.
Degas mainly used unsaturated orange and green with different shades of gray, which is consistent with the palette found in many of his other paintings of women.  Miss La La's arms and legs are not purely brown but are a mixture of orange and green. He learned “the use of green as a second flesh tone” from the 14th-century Italian artist Cennino Cennini, who developed it and taught it to his pupils.In this final painting, Degas intentionally lightened the skin color of Miss La La and painted her costume with yellow and violet to blur her mixed-race identity. He had experimented with different colors in his earlier studies. For example, a pastel sketch Degas made on January 21, 1879 (the second sketch shown below) showed that Miss La La has a much darker skin color and was dressed in blue. The skin color became lighter in his later sketch on January 24, 1879 (the third sketch shown below).The painting's background, the ceiling of the circus, is painted mainly in reddish orange and bluish green. Degas painted the wall in layers, mixing the cold green color with the warm orange color until it achieved a pleasant harmony. Each section of colors is distinct; a hint of green can be seen through the orange area and vice versa. This set of complementary colors harmonized with the colors used to represent Miss La La, integrating her into the background.
Miss La La