The Dance Class

A singer paid for it

In 1873 the opera baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure asked Degas for a picture of dancers of the Opera ballet at an examination or a class. Faure was already buying Impressionist paintings and eventually held the largest collection of Degas's work in France. The canvas reached him in November 1874 and he paid five thousand francs for it.

Faure is not in the painting, but the wall points at him. To the left of the mirror hangs a framed poster for Gioachino Rossini's opera Guillaume Tell, the work Faure was most praised for singing. The Metropolitan Museum reads the poster as a tribute to the man who paid.

In April 1876 Faure lent the picture to the second Impressionist exhibition, where it hung under the title Examen de danse. It stayed with him until 1898, when he sold it to the dealer Durand-Ruel for ten thousand francs. Durand-Ruel moved it to New York and sold it that April for twenty-five thousand dollars.

A room that had already burned down

The setting no longer existed when Degas painted it. The Paris Opera's house on the rue Le Peletier burned down in 1873, in a fire whose cause was never established. The company rehearsed at the Salle Ventadour until Charles Garnier's new opera house opened in January 1875.

Degas set the scene in the burned building anyway. Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, who worked through the Paris Opera's own records, have tentatively identified the room as one in the dormer story of the old house. The art historian Robert L. Herbert called the whole image a pure invention rather than a room Degas copied.

Details of dress point the same way. The red and pink carnations in the dancers' hair, the colored sashes, and the black ribbon chokers with lockets were not what girls wore to practice. The Metropolitan Museum notes that they belong to a dress rehearsal or a final examination rather than an ordinary class.

Who Jules Perrot was

Jules Perrot joined the Paris Opera as a dancer at twenty, in 1830. His contract was not renewed in 1835, and he spent the next decades performing and staging ballets across Europe, including eleven years as ballet master at the Imperial theaters in Saint Petersburg from 1849. He came back to Paris in 1861.

By 1874 he was sixty-four, retired from the stage, and teaching classes at the Opera. Degas painted him in strict profile, facing left into the room toward the dancer he is judging, with a bald crown fringed with gray, a heavy jaw and a red shirt under the pale jacket. A charcoal drawing of Perrot connected to the painting is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The near-twin in Paris

There are two Degas paintings of this subject in this format, and they are often confused. Degas began the Paris one, La classe de danse, in late 1873 for the same patron. He revised it, set it aside, and started the New York canvas in the autumn of 1874. The Paris picture was probably finished after it, in 1875 or 1876, and is now at the Musée d'Orsay.

The Metropolitan Museum lists the differences. Its own picture has a mirror reflecting rooftops and chimneys outside; the Paris version replaces that stretch of wall with a wide decorated doorway. The chaperones are gone from the Paris picture. The two dark-haired dancers standing with hands on hips on the platform at the back of the New York room become a single dancer in Paris, facing into the room.

X-radiographs taken at the Metropolitan Museum show that the New York canvas was also reworked. The mirror changed size. The central dancer moved. The head and feet of the dancer at front left were repositioned, and the second dancer from the left was added late.

“more beautiful than any Ver Meer I ever saw”

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Two figures are working and everyone else is waiting. The details follow the examination at the center, the teacher who is judging it, and the props along the edges that tell you which building this is and who paid for the picture.