Degas, Edgar (1834-1917)
La classe de danse (The Dance Class)
1874
Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 77.2 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This work and its variant in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, represent the most ambitious paintings Degas devoted to the theme of the dance. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an “attitude” for her examination. Jules Perrot, a famous ballet master, conducts the class. The imaginary scene is set in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, which had recently burned to the ground. On the wall beside the mirror, a poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell pays tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition. (MET)
Compare:
Degas, Edgar (1834-1917)
La classe de danse
1873–1876
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
See also:
• Rossini, Gioachino (1792-1868)