Degas was never greatly pre-occupied with color as such. He was out of sympathy with the blond scheme of the luminists and Cézanne's struggle to force color to express formal values left him cold. He tells us himself that he should probably have stuck to black and white if the world had not clamored for more and yet more of those vivid pastels, wherein he used patches of red, green and yellow to such superb decorative e?ect.