The Dance Class

The old man with the stick is not an anonymous ballet master. He is Jules Perrot — co-choreographer of Giselle, one of the greatest dancers of the Romantic ballet, who had partnered Marie Taglioni and toured Europe as a star. By 1874 he was sixty-four, retired from the stage and largely forgotten. Degas drew him from life in a separate study and placed him in the rehearsal room of the old Paris Opéra — the building where Perrot had made his debut more than forty years earlier, and which had just burned down.

Quick Facts

• Artist: Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
• French title: La Classe de danse
• Year: 1874, delivered in November 1874
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 83.5 × 77.2 cm
• Movement: Impressionism
• Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

What makes it unforgettable?

Ballet in nineteenth-century painting meant the stage: the moment of arrival, the arabesque, the applause.

Degas painted the room where none of that happens.

At the centre a young dancer in a pink sash holds an attitude for her examination while Perrot, at the right, judges her. Everyone else is waiting. Some twenty-four women, dancers and their mothers, fill the room. One girl, just to the left of the mirror, seems to be biting her nails in nervous anticipation. Others adjust their costumes, chat, stretch. Almost nobody is dancing.

This is a workplace, and the painting treats it as one — with its boredom, its waiting, and its physical cost.

The composition is the other half of it. The floor tilts up towards the viewer, the vanishing point sits off to one side, and figures are cut by the frame. It looks like a glance through a doorway. It is nothing of the sort — Degas built it from dozens of separate drawings, and changed the figures in the foreground and shifted the central dancer as he worked.

The room and the men who could enter it

This is context the painting depends on, and it is usually softened.

The dancers of the Paris Opéra were mostly girls from poor families who entered the ballet school as children. They were known as petits rats. Training was long, competition brutal, and wages low.

Wealthy subscribers to the Opéra — the abonnés — held the right of access to the rehearsal rooms and the foyer de la danse behind the stage. Women were not admitted. The arrangement was understood by everyone: the men came to look at the dancers and to make arrangements with them or their mothers.

Degas held that access. He was there as an abonné and as an artist, and he painted the system from inside it.

His paintings do not condemn it. But they do not hide it either. In several of his ballet scenes a man in black stands at the edge of the frame, watching.

The mothers in the background are part of the same picture. They came to protect their daughters, and to negotiate.

Two paintings, not one

There are two closely related canvases and they are constantly confused.

In 1872 Degas agreed to paint a dance class for the singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure — one of the very few commissions he ever accepted. He first began the picture now in the Musée d’Orsay, revised it several times, then set it aside. In the autumn of 1874 he turned to this one, and delivered it to Faure in November 1874, after two years of intermittent work on the commission.

In the Orsay version, finished around 1876, Perrot stands at the centre. Here he has moved to the right, and the dancer in the pink sash takes the centre.

On the wall beside the mirror, a small poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell pays tribute to Faure, a star of that opera. In 1876 he lent the painting to the second Impressionist exhibition.

Both pictures are set in the old Opéra on the rue Le Peletier — a building that burned down in October 1873, before either painting was finished. Degas was reconstructing a room that no longer existed.

What to look for

Perrot. At the right, leaning on a long stick, his face turned away in lost profile. The stick was a working tool — ballet masters beat time with it on the floor.

The dancer in the pink sash. At the centre, in a piqué attitude: right arm raised high, left arm straight out to the side, right leg bent behind her. Everything else in the room revolves around this examination.

The nail-biter. Just to the left of the mirror. The only figure whose nerves show on her face.

The mothers. Women in street clothes at the back. They do not belong to the world of the tutus and that is the point.

The poster. Beside the mirror: Guillaume Tell, the tribute to Faure.

The score. On the music stand to the right of the piano, deliberately illegible.

The floor. Wide and empty in the foreground, which is unusual and unbalancing. The eye is pushed towards the figures on the far side.

The ribbons and sashes. Thin notes of colour scattered through an otherwise white and grey painting. They hold the composition together.

Historical context

1874 was the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, which Degas helped organise.

He was, though, an awkward member of the group. He painted indoors, from memory and drawings, and detested the word Impressionist. He called himself a realist. He worked from studies in the studio, not from the motif.

His compositional sources were photography and Japanese woodblock prints — both of which suggested that a picture could be cut off at the edge, viewed from an odd angle, and organised around empty space.

France was three years out of the Commune. The Opéra was one of the institutions through which the Third Republic asserted that order had returned.

About Edgar Degas

Born in Paris in 1834 into a banking family; the name was originally de Gas. He trained in the classical tradition and copied in the Louvre and in Italy.

He worked in oil, pastel, monotype, photography and wax. Around half of his output concerns dancers — some fifteen hundred works.

His eyesight failed progressively from the 1880s, which pushed him towards pastel and modelling in wax, where touch mattered more than precision.

He never married and became increasingly reclusive. During the Dreyfus affair he took a vehemently antisemitic position and broke off lifelong friendships over it, including with the Halévy family. It is a part of his biography that ought not to be omitted.

He died in 1917, aged eighty-three.

Legacy and influence

Degas changed what a picture could be cropped like. The off-centre subject, the figure cut by the frame, the tilted floor — these entered photography and then cinema, and are now so standard as to be invisible.

His dancers also created a problem. They made the ballet world look charming. Reproduced on calendars and biscuit tins, the paintings turned into exactly the sentimental image Degas was working against.

The corrective came from an unexpected direction: his own sculpture, Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which audiences in 1881 found ugly and disturbing. That work makes the economic reality impossible to miss.

Where to see it today

The painting is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, in the European paintings galleries.

• Check hours before travelling. Admission is pay-what-you-wish only for residents of New York State and students from New Jersey and Connecticut; everyone else pays a set rate.
• Weekday mornings are quietest.
• Start at the centre, then look left. The examination is the subject; the girl biting her nails beside the mirror is the commentary on it.
• The Met holds a very large group of Degas pastels and several of his bronzes, including a cast of the Little Dancer.
• The companion painting is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Frequently asked questions

Who is the man with the stick?

Jules Perrot, a celebrated dancer of the Romantic ballet and co-choreographer of Giselle. He made his debut at the Paris Opéra in 1830, aged twenty, so by 1874 he was sixty-four. Degas drew him in a separate study and placed him in the scene.

Is this a real room?

It is based on the old Opéra on the rue Le Peletier — which burned down in 1873, before the painting was finished. Degas reconstructed it from drawings and memory.

What is the difference between this and the Orsay painting?

Both belong to the same commission from the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure. Degas began the Orsay picture first, set it aside after several revisions, and painted this one in the autumn of 1874, delivering it in November. In the Orsay version Perrot stands at the centre; here he stands at the right, watching the dancer in the pink sash.

Who were the dancers?

Mostly girls from poor Parisian families who entered the Opéra’s ballet school as children. They were called petits rats. Wealthy male subscribers to the Opéra had the right to enter the rehearsal rooms, and the sexual dimension of that arrangement was widely understood.

Was Degas an Impressionist?

He helped organise the group’s exhibitions but rejected the label and called himself a realist. He painted indoors, from drawings, in the studio — the opposite of Monet’s practice.

What is the poster on the wall?

An advertisement for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, a tribute to Jean-Baptiste Faure, who sang in that opera and commissioned the painting.

If this painting has caught your interest, look next at Little Dancer of Fourteen Years — Degas’s sculpture of a real fourteen-year-old from the same institution, which audiences in 1881 found genuinely repellent.

Image: La Classe de danse – Edgar Degas (1874). License: Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.