The Dance Class

1874

Oil on canvas, 83.5 × 77.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A practice room at the Paris Opéra, where a ballet master watches one pupil hold a pose. It is one of Degas's two most fully worked dance-class pictures.

Only one girl dances; the rest of the class waits, stretches and fidgets. Degas paints the in-between moments, the ordinary scenes the Impressionists made their subject.
The singer Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned a dance-class picture in 1873; Degas delivered this canvas in November 1874.
The teacher leaning on a tall stick is Jules Perrot, a retired dancer and choreographer.
X-rays show that Degas moved the central dancer and changed the mirror as he worked.
It came to the Met by bequest in 1986.

The Opéra ballet had about two hundred performers, some as young as fourteen. Older women acting as chaperones often waited on benches, as at the back here.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0