La lezione di danza

Around 1879 Degas began shaping his ballet pictures into a long, narrow band, wide as a frieze, and this is the first of some 40 he would paint that way. He took the format from his own racecourse scenes, where a low horizontal stretch let the eye travel across the canvas. What drew him to the ballet was never the performance. It was the dull in-between moments, dancers resting, fixing a shoe, waiting out a rehearsal in a plain practice room. It looks caught on the spot, though little here is accidental. Degas exhibited alongside the Impressionists but disliked working in the open air, preferring memory and notes. A surviving notebook maps out this very room, the seated girl at the center, the tall window at the right, the double bass and open violin case set into the far left corner.