The Dance Class

A ballet class with no ballet in it — scratching, twisting, waiting, an old man with a stick — Impressionism’s most honest argument about work.

1. 1
   The legend in the corner

   Right foreground, the elderly man in a brown jacket

   The white-haired man at the right, leaning his weight forward onto a long walking stick, is Jules Perrot — once one of the great male stars of European ballet, partner of Marie Taglioni, choreographer of Giselle’s ghost-act. By 1874 he was sixty-four, retired, and teaching to keep busy. He is the one figure painted with full portrait care: every other face is sketched, his is finished. (He is also a second draft: X-ray shows Degas first painted an earlier, unidentified dance master in this spot, then painted Perrot over him.)
2. 2
   The unposed second

   Across the middle group of dancers in pale tutus

   Don’t look for a graceful pose. Look for the opposite — the small unguarded gestures painters before Degas would have edited out. One girl has reached an arm up to scratch the back of her neck. Another is twisted around to talk to a neighbour. Another is bent forward, adjusting a slipper. Several are leaning on the dance bar, just waiting. The picture’s whole argument is sitting in those little human gestures.
3. 3
   Standing on a hinge

   The whole floor of the rehearsal room

   Notice how the wooden floor seems to rear up toward you, as if you were leaning over a balcony rather than seated quietly in a corner. The floor doesn’t recede politely into the back of the room; it tilts, throwing the dancers out across its surface like a tray. This off-axis, tipped-up floor is a compositional trick Degas learned from Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) flooding Paris in his decade — the deliberate cut-off and the high tilted viewpoint, borrowed on purpose.
4. 4
   Sliced by the frame

   Far right edge of the canvas

   Look at the very right edge. The picture slices a dancer in half: you see a sliver of tutu, a shoulder, the side of a face — and then nothing. The canvas stops in the middle of a person, as if a camera shutter caught her on her way out of frame. Painters in 1874 didn’t do this; figures were supposed to be complete inside the picture. The trick is again from Japanese prints.
5. 5
   Factory-floor evidence

   On the floorboards, just to the left of the central group

   That small dull-metal cylindrical object near the dancers’ feet is a watering can. It is there because the rehearsal-room floor had to be sprinkled with water before class so the dancers wouldn’t slip on the bare boards. Degas paints it with the seriousness of a Dutch still life — documentary evidence that this is a workplace. Factory floors had buckets. Rehearsal floors had watering cans.
6. 6
   Posted at the threshold

   Upper right of the canvas, near the doorway opening into the secondary room

   Look up to the upper right, near where the back wall opens through a doorway into a further room. In dark dresses and hats, in shadow on benches, sit several women — the stage mothers, working-class Paris parents who came with their dancing daughters to every rehearsal. They are posted by the door not because their presence kept anyone out — it didn’t; the wealthy male abonnés (subscribers) had backstage access bought into their subscription, and a mother on a bench couldn’t revoke a ticket — but because their presence let a working-class family keep up the appearance of supervision.
7. 7
   A private love note to the patron

   Back wall, behind the dancers, partly visible

   On the back wall, half-screened by the central column and the cluster of dancers, you can just read the printed title of an opera poster: Guillaume Tell — Rossini’s opera about the Swiss crossbow archer. This is Degas’s private courtesy to his patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the painting and was famous in Paris as the leading baritone in the title role.