The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage

c. 1874

Oil thinned with turpentine, with watercolor and pastel, over pen and ink on paper, mounted on canvas, 54.3 × 73 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Dancers rehearse, wait and yawn on the Opéra stage. Degas began it as an ink drawing and brushed thin oil color over the lines.

Degas sets us just above the orchestra pit, the tops of two double basses cutting into the bottom edge. Impressionist painters, Degas above all, often chose high, cropped views like this.
It is one of three related versions; a larger gray one hung in the first Impressionist exhibition, 1874.
The writer George Moore said the Illustrated London News refused the drawing as improper; Degas then painted over it.
Louisine and Henry Havemeyer acquired it in 1902, and it came to the Met in 1929.

Season subscribers (abonnés) could enter the wings, and many pursued the young, often poor dancers. Two of them sprawl on chairs at the right.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0