Ballet Rehearsal

In the spring of 1874 a group of painters put on their own show in Paris, outside the official Salon, and the newspapers coined a mocking name for them: Impressionists. Degas exhibited with them, though he disliked the label and thought of himself as a realist. Around that year he painted this, and notice what he chose: not a performance, but an ordinary rehearsal. Dancers practise an arabesque by the tall windows while others wait, chatting or having a costume pinned. At the top left a spiral staircase cuts the scene, and all you see of one dancer is her legs coming down it. Much of the foreground is just bare, scuffed floorboards, the kind of framing Degas borrowed from photographs and Japanese prints.