The Dance Class by Edgar Degas

The Dance Class by Edgar Degas

Waiting their turn

In a high green rehearsal room, a dancer in the middle distance holds a pose, one arm raised, for her examination, while the ballet master Jules Perrot, in a loose grey suit and a red shirt, watches with both hands on a tall stick. Almost nobody else is paying attention. Dancers at the left lean against a piano, one in the foreground bends her head to look down at her skirt, and at the back a crowd of dancers and mothers wait on a raised step. Degas cuts the room off at the edges and pushes a music stand and the scroll of a stringed instrument into the foreground.

An imaginary class

The scene is invented. Perrot was a celebrated dancer and ballet master of an earlier generation, and the room is in the old Paris Opéra, which had burnt down the year before. The picture was commissioned by the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, and the poster on the wall beside the mirror, for Rossini’s opera Guillaume Tell, is a tribute to him. Faure lent it to the Impressionist exhibition of 1876. A companion version is in the Musée d’Orsay.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, bequeathed by Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham in 1986, and measures 83.5 by 77.2 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 3,682-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 24 inches on its longest side.

Sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Wikidata Q18758802 · Wikimedia Commons