The Dance Class1874
Dancers stretch, wait and fidget while the veteran ballet master Jules Perrot, leaning on a tall staff, takes a class in a rehearsal room of the Paris Opéra. More about this work
About this work
Dancers stretch, wait and fidget while the veteran ballet master Jules Perrot, leaning on a tall staff, takes a class in a rehearsal room of the Paris Opéra. Degas pushes him off-centre and lets the eye drift through the room instead, to dancers stretching, resting or simply waiting their turn. The setting is the Opéra’s old house on the rue Le Peletier, destroyed by fire in 1873, so the scene was assembled in the studio from drawings and posed models. What interested Degas was not the performance but the restless, unglamorous moments around it.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917 · Born and died in Paris.
Degas trained in the academic tradition, admired Ingres and spent three years in Italy copying earlier art, but turned to modern Paris for his subjects: dancers, racecourses, laundresses, milliners and café singers. He helped organise the Impressionist exhibitions and showed in all but one, yet preferred to call himself a realist. Working from drawing and memory rather than outdoors, he composed with unexpected cropping and viewpoints, and in later years worked mostly in pastel as his eyesight failed.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Impressionism
Painters in 1870s Paris who worked quickly, often outdoors, to catch light as it changed.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1987.47.1
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Paintings
- Department
- European Paintings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Edgar Degas
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Close in colour
