A rehearsal room caught mid-yawn

Stand in front of the picture and the first thing your eye does is fall over. The floor is tipped — wildly tipped, as if the room is on a hinge. Instead of looking intoa rehearsal room from a respectful seat in the corner, you feel like you are leaning out over the floorboards from a balcony, half-falling in. That is the first move, and everything else in the painting is built on it. So let’s actually walk the canvas, top to bottom, side to side, and see what’s there.

It is a small picture (a little under three feet on the long side; the size of a tall reading-room chair). It is oil on canvas, signed Degas at the lower left. The room is taller than it is wide, with a high ceiling and a tall window in the far back wall throwing in the cool overhead daylight that lights the whole scene; there are no candles, no gas lamps, no electric bulbs (electric light won’t come to the Opéra for a few more years). The wall behind the dancers carries the dance bars — the polished wooden rails fixed at waist height that dancers grip to stretch and warm up against, held to the wall by small brass studs. On the back wall, partly visible, is a poster for an opera; you can just read the printed title — Guillaume Tell. Hold that detail; it’s a private joke, and Chapter 4 cashes it in.

Now the people. Spread across the room — and “spread” is exactly the word, because they are scattered, not arranged — are about twenty-four dancers, all in pale practice tutus with a colored ribbon sash at the waist (red, blue, green, yellow; little dabs of pure color that ping across an otherwise tan-and-cream picture). They are not in a line. They are not facing the same way. They are doing about a dozen different things at once. One girl is twisted around to talk to a neighbor. Another is bent slightly forward, adjusting a slipper. Another has reached one arm up to scratch the back of her neck — a small, unposed, instantly familiar human gesture that almost never appears in nineteenth-century painting because almost no nineteenth-century painter thought it was worthy of paint. Two more are leaning against the wall, waiting. A girl at the left front edge of the floor is stretching her back. Behind a heavy pale column in the middle of the room, half-hidden, more dancers blur into the further room — Degas has actually sliced one of them in half with the column, so you only see a tutu and an elbow and have to mentally finish the figure. (That column-as-slicer is a Japanese print move; we’ll come back to it.)

In the right foreground, dressed in a brown jacket and dark trousers, leaning his weight forward onto a long walking stick that touches the floor in front of his shoes, stands the painting’s still point: an elderly white-haired man, fully and carefully described, his face the only one in the picture given full portrait treatment. This is Jules Perrot, the retired star, the legend put in as a teacher (Chapter 2). He is the one figure who feels finished by the standards of nineteenth-century painting — every other person is sketched in with the practical haste of working paint. Perrot is posed. Everyone else is caught. That contrast is doing real work: the legend stands, formally portrayed; the working corps swirls around him, in motion, half-formed, mid-gesture.

Now look down to the left foreground, low, almost on the floor. There is a small dog, ears alert, sitting or sniffing near the bottom edge of the canvas. A dog. In a rehearsal room. It is a deliberately silly note — the kind of unromantic detail a serious history painter would have edited out. Degas kept it because it makes the room a room, not a stage.

Now look up to the upper right of the picture. Above the dancers’ heads, near where the back wall opens into a secondary room visible through a doorway, you can pick out a small clutch of figures in dark dresses, hats on, in shadow. These are the stage mothers introduced in Chapter 1 — chaperones for the working dancers, posted near the doorway the abonnés used to come backstage. They are not described in detail. They are sketched as dark masses with pale faces; you can read them as a row of guardians by the threshold rather than as individuals. Degas refuses to identify any single one of them, and so should we; any caption that names a specific mother in this painting is making it up.

Now find, on the floor, just to the left of the central group, a small dull-metal cylindrical object that an inattentive eye reads as a stray prop. It is a watering can. It is there for a reason: the wood floor of a rehearsal room had to be sprinkled with water from a can before class, so the dancers wouldn’t skid. The watering can on the floorboards is one of the picture’s small loud claims that this is a workplace, not a fantasy. Factory floors had buckets. Rehearsal floors had watering cans. Degas painted the can the way a Dutch still life painter would have painted a tankard — as documentary evidence.

Now look at the right edge of the painting. The canvas slices a dancer in half: half a torso, a shoulder, the side of a face, a sliver of tutu, then nothing — the picture stops in the middle of a person, as if a camera shutter clipped her on the way out of frame. Cropping like that, in 1874, was new. Degas had learned it from Japanese woodblock prints — the cheap mass-produced color prints called ukiyo-e (pronounced “oo-kee-yo-eh,” “pictures of the floating world”) that had flooded into Paris when Japan reopened to Western trade in the 1860s. He owned a stack. The French taste for them had a name — Japonisme (pronounced “jah-poh-NEEZM”) — and The Dance Class is one of its first masterpieces. Three moves to spot, all from the prints: the floor tipped up so it tilts toward you instead of receding politely; a figure clipped by the frame as if seen out of the corner of an eye; a column slicing the picture in half, blocking part of what you wanted to see. Western seriousness, Western daylight, Western working room — composed like a Japanese print.

That is, finally, the trick. The polite version of this painting would have been twelve dancers in a row, facing forward, the teacher in profile, the floor receding into Albertian space. Degas tipped the floor, hid half the figures behind a column, sliced one in half at the frame, gave one a back-scratch and one a sash to fix, put a small dog in the corner, and pushed the chaperones up into the shadow by the doorway. The room is a record of attention, not arrangement. That is what “modern” means here. It is the look of the unrehearsed second inside the rehearsal.