The Dance Class
The Dance Class
Edgar Degas
France
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The Dance Class
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About The Artwork
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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.
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Artwork Type: Print
About the artist

The eldest son of a Parisian banker, Edgar Degas reinforced his formal academic art training by copying Old Master paintings both in Italy, where he spent three years (1856–1859), and at the Louvre. Degas early on developed a rigorous drawing style and a respect for line that he would maintain throughout his career. His first independent works were portraits and history paintings but in the early 1860s he began to paint scenes from modern life. He started with the world of horse racing and by the end of the 1860s had also turned his attention to the theater and ballet.
Soon after a trip to New Orleans, where his uncle and two of his brothers worked in the cotton trade, in 1873, Degas banded together with other artists interested in organizing independent exhibitions without juries. He became a founding member of what soon would be known as the impressionists, participating in six impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.
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