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The room is the dancers' rehearsal foyer of the Opéra on the rue Le Peletier, which Degas knew from the inside through friends in its orchestra. The building burned on a night in October 1873, after a performance, and the company spent the next 14 months in a borrowed theatre until Garnier's new opera house opened in January 1875. Degas went on setting dancers in that lost foyer for years afterwards, shifting its mirrors and windows about as freely as he shifted the dancers. This one, painted around 1870, started the long run of rehearsal pictures. He was in his mid-thirties and had recently served through the siege of Paris in the National Guard, where rifle practice showed him that his right eye barely worked.