This painting shows the scene from Meyerbeer’s Gothic romance, Robert the Devil. Under Bertram’s orders, the nuns are brought back to life to haunt his son, Robert.

Ballet Scene was owned by Constantine Alexander Ionides, and was the earliest known work by Degas to enter a public collection in Britain. Sickert, who shared Degas’s fascination with the atmosphere of the stage, probably saw the painting in Ionides’s London home.

Degas shows the acrobat, Miss La La, performing her star turn at the Cirque Fernando, one of four permanent circuses in Paris. We gaze at her as if through a pair of binoculars, as she dangles from a rope, hanging on by her teeth.

Sickert saw this work in Degas’s Paris apartment. He said later: ‘Degas told us that he had been unable to come up with any perspective and that he had employed a professional for the drawing of the architecture of the ceiling.’

This is a portrait of the artist’s wife, Christina Mary Stott (CMS). It is one of a number of delicate pastels he produced during the 1880s. The intimate subject matter echoes the domesticity of Degas’s pastels, which Stott would have seen in the collections of British dealers and in exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery.

Stott achieved rapid success during this lifetime and exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon. Sickert described him as ‘one of the two greatest living painters of the world’.

Steer painted Rose Pettigrew on numerous occasions throughout the 1890s. Here he cuts off the edge of the sofa to create the effect of a snapshot.

Like Degas, Steer enjoyed the versatility of pastel. His skill in this medium is evident from the hatched strokes in Rose’s brightly embroidered dress which dominates the picture space.

In this intimate painting Steer shows Rose Pettigrew in her petticoat and stockings. The subject may have been inspired by Degas’s pastels of solitary female bathers. Like Rose, they are usually detached from the viewer, either looking away or hiding their faces.

Steer, fifteen years her senior, was obsessed with Rose. He thought she was ‘a lovely subject, very graceful … knowing how to pose’.

This portrait shows Sickert’s wife Ellen ‘Nelly’ Cobden. It was probably painted when Sickert and Ellen visited Degas in Paris in 1885.

Ellen was a supporter of women’s suffrage. She wears a loose dark tunic which at the time was associated with the Rationale dress movement. Degas may have added the inscription on the painting, ‘ça m’est egal’ (‘it’s equal to me’) to draw attention to Ellen’s gender politics.

Degas achieved the effects of a grey, misty day on the racecourse by using essence: pigment thinned with turpentine which gave the effect of watercolour. The experimental composition was not lost on British critics. George Moore noticed ‘The principal horse’s head being cut in two by a long white post’.

Just as he painted dancers rehearsing rather than performing on stage, Degas invariably painted the moments before the start of the race, rather than the event itself.

Mrs Cyprian Williams, an amateur artist and the wife of an art collector, dominates the foreground of this painting. Despite the claustrophobic space the children appear remote from her, absorbed in their own activities

The unusual perspective of Steer’s composition was influenced by Degas’s work. Both artists were influenced by Japanese prints, made explicit here by the inclusion of the two Japanese dolls, and the Japanese fabric on the back of the armchair.

Two women are shown enjoying the warmth of a blazing fire in this extraordinary pastel. Guthrie experimented with this versatile medium in the 1890s. Here he makes the room appear to glow with fiery red and orange flames.

Several of the pastels Guthrie produced towards the end of the century show the everyday lives of the middle classes who lived around Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde.

Degas started painting silk fans in the late 1870s, in imitation of Japanese fans. Here he experiments with the semi-circular format to re-create the atmosphere of a night at the theatre. The principal dancer is spot-lit, and surrounded by a group of ballerinas in tutus.

Fans were often associated with flirtatious behaviour; they became a common accessory for women in the 1890s.

Degas began to experiment with the semicircular format for fans during the 1870s, often using the same themes as in his paintings. Here we look down on the performers from above the stage. The group of top-hatted gentlemen in the wings may be the stage or dance directors.

This fan was bought by a close friend of Sickert, Sir William Eden.

When Conder arrived in Paris from Australia in the 1880s he began to paint subtle designs for fans in watercolour on silk. The artist William Rothenstein recalled Oscar Wilde exclaiming ‘Dear Conder! With what exquisite subtlety he goes about persuading someone to give him a hundred francs for a fan, for which he was fully prepared to pay three hundred!’

Conder’s delicate colours and designs were inspired by eighteenth-century sources.