Commissioned by Faure, painted over an earlier figure

Most paintings that look this casual were not casual to make. The Dance Classtook Degas about a year — not because it is large (it is small, about two feet nine inches by two feet six, which is closer to the size of a window than a wall) but because there was a paying customer waiting, and because the painter changed his mind in the middle and rewrote a key figure.

Start with the customer, because nothing about this picture makes sense without him. His name was Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830–1914), and in 1870s Paris he was famous — not as a collector but as a singer. Faure was the Paris Opéra’s leading baritone, the man whose voice carried the heavy male roles, especially the title role in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (the four-hour Italian-French opera about the legendary Swiss crossbow archer; “Rossini” being Gioachino Rossini, the Italian composer who basically invented the modern operatic crowd-pleaser). Faure was a star inside the same Opéra building whose rehearsal rooms Degas had been sketching. He was also, quietly, one of the most important early patrons of the Impressionists — he bought Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Degas at a time when most respectable buyers wouldn’t touch them. In 1873 he commissioned this painting directly from Degas, with one specific demand: he wanted dancers. Degas was already known for them; Faure wanted a Degas Degas.

The commission was a contract, not a courtesy. Faure agreed to pay 5,000 francs (a real sum for a small canvas — roughly what a Paris doctor might earn in a year), and Degas agreed to deliver. Then Degas did what Degas always did, which was take his time. The painting is dated 1874, but it didn’t actually arrive at Faure’s house until November 1874, almost two years after the commission. Faure had to write more than one polite letter to ask where his picture was.

What was Degas doing for two years? Partly he was reworking the picture. We know this because of one of the small miracles of modern museum technology: the X-radiograph, an X-ray taken of a painting, which shows you the dense paint layers underneath the surface like an architectural plan of the artist’s changes. When the Met X-rayed The Dance Class, the right foreground gave up a secret. The figure standing there now — the elderly ballet master leaning on a long stick — is a second draft, painted on top of a first one. Underneath, the X-ray reveals an earlier, unidentified dance master figure, seen from the back: a different man in the same spot, doing the same compositional job, scrubbed away and replaced. Who was the first man? The honest answer is that we don’t know, and the responsible scholarship doesn’t claim to. (The Met’s related Orsay-version canvas has its own pentimento with a different identification; the Met X-ray is its own, separate change, and the figure it hides has not been pinned to a specific name.) What we do know is that Degas painted some working dance master in there first, and then thought better of it.

Why? Because, after thinking about it, he had a better idea about what the figure in that spot was for. The man at the right of the painting was going to be the gravitational center of the whole scene — the one finished, fully-described face, the still point everything else swirled around. A working ballet master was the right answer if you wanted a documentary record of who taught at the Opéra in 1873. But Degas didn’t want documentary. He wanted history. So he replaced the first man with Jules Perrot(1810–1892).

Perrot was a name. He had been, decades earlier, one of the great male stars of European ballet — a partner of Marie Taglioni (the most famous ballerina of the Romantic era), the choreographer (the person who invents and arranges the steps) of much of Giselle, including its haunted second act. By 1874 he was sixty-four, retired, and back in Paris in his last working decade, taking some teaching to keep busy. Putting him at the right edge of this canvas was not a portrait of who actually taught the Opéra corps that morning. It was a portrait of the long history of ballet itself standing in the corner of the room, leaning on a stick, watching the next generation. Degas chose the legend over the bureaucrat. The X-ray catches him making exactly that choice, in paint.

There is one more piece of the making that is easy to skate past. The room Degas painted — the rehearsal room he had been sketching for years — did not exist anymore when he delivered the picture. On October 28 and 29, 1873, the old Paris Opéra building on the rue Le Peletier (the Salle Le Peletier) had burned to the ground in a catastrophic overnight fire. By the time Faure took delivery of The Dance Class in November 1874, the room in the painting was a memory; the dancers were already drilling in temporary halls while the new Opéra (the famous Palais Garnier, the wedding-cake building tourists still queue for) was being finished a few blocks away. Degas painted the lost room from his old sketches and his memory, in the studio, after the fact. Which means anyone who tells you he painted The Dance Class“from life in a real class” is wrong twice: he composed it in the studio, and the class itself, in that room, had already been canceled by a fire. It is a memorial as much as a snapshot — a working room reconstructed from sketches because the actual one had become smoke and ash. Faure’s commission gave him the deadline. The fire gave him the elegy.