Dancers in the Rehearsal Room

In 1900 Paris was watching a new kind of dancing. At the Exposition Universelle that year the American dancer Loie Fuller had a theatre of her own, where she swirled great lengths of silk under coloured electric light. Edgar Degas, in his late sixties, was still drawing the rehearsal rooms of the Paris Opera ballet, the practice, the waiting and the barre, a world he had been working on for more than 20 years. Around 1880 he had begun a run of rehearsal scenes in a long, low format, like a frieze on a classical building, and the Museum of Fine Arts counts this sheet among the last of them. It is almost twice as wide as it is tall, about 85 centimetres across, and it is worked in charcoal, with pastel added over it. It came to the museum in 1954 as a gift from the New York collector Arthur Wiesenberger. Degas dated nothing here, and the museum places the sheet somewhere between 1900 and 1905.