The Dance Class

The old Paris Opera on the Rue Le Peletier had burned to the ground in 1873, the year before Degas set this rehearsal inside it. So the room full of young dancers waiting their turn is a place that no longer existed when he painted it, rebuilt here from memory and studies. The stern man leaning on his stick is a real person, Jules Perrot, once one of the great dancers of the romantic ballet, here in old age coaching the next crop. Look for the poster on the wall for Rossini's opera Guillaume Tell. It nods to the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, the singer who commissioned the picture and lent it to the Impressionist exhibition of 1876.