Degas | The Dance Class

About The Dance Class by Edgar Degas

Degas painted The Dance Class in 1874 for the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who lent it to the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. It is one of a pair of closely related canvases begun at much the same time; the other, slightly larger, hangs in the Musée d'Orsay and is usually called The Ballet Class.

The room never existed as shown. The setting is a rehearsal room in the Paris Opéra's old house in the rue Le Peletier — a building that had burned to the ground in October 1873, the year before Degas painted it. He assembled the scene in the studio from separate drawings of individual girls and set them out across a steeply tilted floor. Most of them are not dancing. One scratches her back, one fiddles with an earring, one sits on a piano. The playbill on the wall is for Rossini's Guillaume Tell, one of Faure's roles: a private compliment to the man paying for the picture.

The old man leaning on the stick is real. He is Jules Perrot, one of the great dancers and ballet masters of the Romantic era and a maker of the choreography for Giselle, by then in his sixties and giving private lessons for a living.

Own a hand-painted The Dance Class

Everything that makes this picture work happens at a very small size. On a canvas 83 cm high the dancers' heads are barely two centimetres across, and Degas gives each girl her character — bored, itchy, distracted, half-listening — with perhaps a dozen strokes apiece. Those strokes are drawing, not texture; take one away and the girl loses her expression. A printed reproduction is a grid of dots sampled once, at one size. Scale it up for a wall and the dots scale with it, so those dozen decisive marks arrive as soft blurred patches and the small figures stop reading as people at all. Painted by hand, the picture is drawn again at whatever size you order — the marks are made fresh, small enough to stay marks and definite enough to stay faces.