Faure → Durand-Ruel → Payne → the Met

The afterlife of The Dance Class is a story about how one painting can pass through five sets of hands across more than a century, and almost — but never quite — become a different picture every step of the way. To follow it you need one plain word: provenance, which means the documented chain of who owned a work of art, from the artist’s hand to wherever it sits now. Provenance is a painting’s paper trail. This one’s reads like a real-estate deed.

The first owner was Faure himself. He took delivery in November 1874, paid his 5,000 francs, hung the picture, lent it to the 1876 show (Chapter 4), and held onto it for almost a quarter of a century. Then, on 19 February 1898, Faure sold it — but not directly to its next collector. He sold it to a dealer. Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922) was the Paris dealer who had basically built the Impressionist market, the man who underwrote Monet through his hungry years and ran the gallery where the Second Exhibition had hung. Faure handed Durand-Ruel The Dance Class on the 19th of February for 10,000 francs— about double what he had paid Degas for it in 1874, a respectable but not yet thunderous return after twenty-four years.

Durand-Ruel did not keep it. Six weeks later, on 4 April 1898, he sold it on to an American: Colonel Oliver H. Payne (1839–1917), a New York industrialist, one of the founding executives of Standard Oil, very rich, and at that moment one of a wave of American millionaires busy hoovering up European art and shipping it home. Payne paid roughly $25,000— a startling jump from the 10,000 francs Durand-Ruel had handed Faure in February, and the dealer’s margin is the story of the sale. Durand-Ruel had spent the 1880s and 1890s patiently building an American clientele for the Impressionists, traveling to New York, putting on shows, courting the new industrial money; by 1898 he could turn a French collector’s painting into an American collector’s painting at a sharp markup because he was the only person on either side of the Atlantic who knew both rooms. So the provenance is two steps, not one: Faure → Durand-Ruel, 19 February 1898, 10,000 francs; Durand-Ruel → Payne, 4 April 1898, ~$25,000. The painting sailed for New York that spring. It is a sign that, by the end of the century, the market had finally caught up to Degas — and that the engine of that catch-up was a dealer, not a museum.

From Payne the painting passed by inheritance, in 1917, to his nephew Harry Payne Bingham (d. 1955), and then to Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham at her husband’s death. The Binghams kept it quietly through the middle of the twentieth century. In 1986, when Mrs. Bingham died, she bequeathed the picture to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met accessioned it the following year under the catalog number 1987.47.1. It has been on view, on and off, ever since, currently in Gallery 815.

Now the most important correction in this whole essay, because it is the mistake that gets written most often. The Dance Class in the Met is sometimes carelessly described as “given to the Met by the Havemeyers in 1929.” That is wrong. It confuses this painting with a different, smaller, separate Degas picture also in the Met — a small panel called The Dancing Class (note the different title), about eight by ten inches, painted around the same period, which was bequeathed by Louisine Havemeyer (the great American collector of Impressionists, wife of the sugar magnate Henry Osborne Havemeyer) in 1929 under accession number 29.100.184. Two different Degas paintings of dancers, both at the Met, with confusingly similar titles, by routes that are easy to mix up. The 83-by-77-centimeter The Dance Class (the one this essay is about) came to the Met by the Bingham bequest in 1986–87. The little panel The Dancing Class came by the Havemeyer bequest in 1929. They are not the same painting and they did not come in the same way.

There is one more painting we have to deal with, because the confusion compounds. In the Musée d’Orsay in Paris hangs a painting almost the same size as the Met’s Dance Class (about 33 by 30 inches), also showing a rehearsal room, also with Jules Perrot at the right leaning on his stick, also with a watering can on the floor. It is called La Classe de danse and is dated roughly 1873–76. People sometimes describe these as “two versions of the same painting,”as if Degas painted it twice. They are not. They are two separate, related canvases — different compositions sharing a vocabulary, the way a writer might write two essays on the same subject. The Orsay picture rearranges the dancers differently, frames the room differently, treats the light differently. Both are autograph (meaning Degas painted both with his own hand). Both feature Perrot because Degas painted Perrot — as the legendary teacher-in-the-corner — into a whole family of rehearsal pictures in the 1870s. Scholars still debate which canvas was started first; the Pickvance camp argues the Orsay version was begun earlier, the Lemoisne camp argued for the Met’s. What no responsible art historian does is call them “the same painting.” They are two separate works in the same dance-class neighborhood.

So sit, finally, with the arc of this picture. Faure ordered it from a friend in 1873, took delivery in late 1874, lent it for the second Impressionist show in 1876, kept it nearly a quarter-century, then in a single Paris spring handed it off to Durand-Ruel, who quietly sent it across the Atlantic to a Standard Oil man for the price of a small mansion. It sat in an industrialist’s apartment, then a nephew’s, then a widow’s, for almost ninety years. It came to the Met in 1986 as a bequest, was given a number in 1987, and has been hanging in Gallery 815 since.

And on the floor of that small dim gallery, inside a frame the size of a window, the picture’s argument keeps quietly making itself. A teenage girl scratches her back. An old man with a stick leans on it. A small dog sits in the corner. And — set down on the boards just to the left of the central group, where the rest of the picture has been organizing itself around it the whole time — sits a small dull-metal watering can. It is the picture’s last word and its first one. Sprinkle the boards. Wet the floor. The dancers won’t slip. The show goes on, in a few hours, in a different building, in front of the men in the seats. The labor is here, in this room, on these boards, with this can. The Dance Class keeps painting the watering can the way a court painter would paint a crown. It is what the picture is about. Stand in the gallery long enough and you stop seeing the tutus and start seeing the can.