The Dance Class
Young ballerinas wait, scratch themselves and adjust their skirts while the teacher leads the lesson. Degas captures the moments between performances.
The view is oblique and cropped like a photograph – new and modern in the 1870s.
Edgar Degas depicted ballet dancers in hundreds of paintings, drawings and sculptures. He had access to the rehearsal rooms of the Paris Opéra and studied the dancers during classes and rehearsals. The Dance Class exists in several versions. The one in the Musée d’Orsay was painted in 1873–1876. It was commissioned by the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure. Degas was fascinated by movement and by bodies at work.
The picture shows a large room with high walls and mirrors. In the middle stands the old ballet master Jules Perrot, leaning on a stick and leading the class. A young dancer in front of him performs a step. Around them other dancers stand and sit. They wait, adjust their skirts, wave fans or scratch themselves. At the very back sit some mothers who have accompanied their daughters. Perrot was a celebrated dancer and choreographer who taught at the Opéra.
On the left a dancer sits on a piano scratching her back. In the foreground is a green watering can, used to dampen the floor. Degas captures everyday gestures, not just the elegance of the dance. He shows the dancers as young working women, as often tired and bored as elegant. There are many details, and the eye wanders around the room as if we were standing in it ourselves, watching.
The composition is unusual. The floor takes up a great deal of space, and the perspective tilts. The figures are placed asymmetrically, and some are cut off by the edge of the picture. This recalls photographs and Japanese woodblock prints, which Degas and his contemporaries collected and admired. The room opens diagonally into the background, and the floorboards reinforce the sense of depth.
The old opera house in the rue Le Peletier was destroyed by fire in 1873. Degas continued to paint the room from memory and with the help of sketches. His dance pictures are therefore not direct snapshots, even though they look like them. He composed them carefully in the studio, often from figures he had drawn on different occasions. It is a constructed reality.
Degas did not like to be counted as an Impressionist and preferred to call himself a realist. Even so, he took part in almost all of the group’s exhibitions. The Dance Class was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. It later entered the Louvre through a donation by the collector Isaac de Camondo and was moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986. Degas liked to work in pastel, and many of his dance pictures are in that medium.
Degas’s dance pictures became very popular and have shaped the popular image of ballet. At the same time they have been discussed critically, since the young dancers often lived in harsh conditions and were exposed to the attentions of wealthy men. The picture can thus be read both as a tribute to dance and as a depiction of hard work.