About this artwork
Degas painted The Dance Class in 1874, the most ambitious of his ballet scenes and the painting that established the subject as his signature. He was 40 years old and had been painting dancers for four years, but this is the canvas where the subject reaches its full scale and complexity.
The scene shows a rehearsal room at the old Paris Opera on the rue Le Peletier, which had burned down the year before. The ballet master Jules Perrot sits at the center, leaning on a tall cane, watching a young dancer execute an attitude for her examination. Around them, two dozen ballerinas and their mothers wait, stretch, adjust ribbons, and talk among themselves. A poster for Rossini's Guillaume Tell hangs on the wall beside a mirror, paying tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the painting.
The composition is dense and deliberate. Degas arranged the figures in a loose spiral around the ballet master, with the examining dancer at the center of attention. The mothers and waiting dancers fill the edges of the canvas, some cut off by the frame, creating the sense of a crowded room glimpsed through a doorway. The floor is painted in warm, reflective browns, and the light comes from a high window at the left, casting soft shadows across the room.
Degas painted this canvas for Faure, a celebrated baritone and an early collector of Impressionist work. Faure lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition, where it was seen alongside paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro. A variant of the composition is in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The two versions differ in small details: the Met's version has a more finished surface and a slightly different arrangement of figures in the background.
The painting was made the same year as the first Impressionist exhibition, but Degas's approach has little in common with Monet's plein-air landscapes. Degas worked in the studio from drawings and memory, building his compositions over months. He thought of himself as a draftsman in the tradition of Ingres, not as an Impressionist, though he exhibited with the group through 1886.
Oil on canvas, 83 by 77 centimeters. Degas used a warm, muted palette of creams, pinks, and browns, with touches of blue and green in the dancers' sashes. The surface is more finished than his later ballet paintings, with carefully modeled faces and hands. The floor is the most loosely painted area, built in broad strokes of brown and gray.
The near-square format makes this print versatile. It works in a living room, a study, or a child's room. The warm palette suits rooms with wood furniture and soft lighting. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the figures enough room to read. The painting has a busy, social energy that suits rooms where people gather.
The painting entered the Met's collection in 1986, bequeathed by Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham. It is one of the most important Degas paintings in America.
This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
