The Ballet Class

Degas painted this dance class in the early 1870s, when the ballet at the Paris Opera had become his great subject. What caught him was never the performance under the lights but the ordinary work behind it, the rehearsal room where dancers wait, stretch, scratch a back or fix a ribbon. The stern old man leaning on his stick in the middle is a real person, the ballet master Jules Perrot, once a famous dancer himself, and the girls around him pay him only half their attention. Degas had unusual access to these rooms as a subscriber to the Opera, which let him watch classes most outsiders never saw. The picture came into public hands through the bequest of a collector, Count Isaac de Camondo, in 1911.