Ballo in maschera all'Opera

Manet sketched this scene in the spring of 1873 inside the old Paris opera house on the rue Le Peletier, where a masked ball was held each year during Lent. Months later that building burned to the ground in a night-time fire, so the very room he recorded no longer existed by the time he finished the canvas in his studio. The crowd he painted is almost all black top hats and dark coats, a wall of respectable men pressing in on a scatter of masked women. Some of these women were ladies hiding their identity for the evening, others were of the demimonde, and the point of the ball was that you could not always tell which. Along the top edge a pair of legs in striped stockings dangles from the balcony, a small comic note above the sober black. The 1874 Salon turned the picture down as too coarse for its walls.