Lent by Faure to the 2nd show, not the 1st

This is the chapter to pause and clear away one stubborn mistake, because almost everybody who tells the story of this painting gets it wrong: The Dance Class was not in the famous first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. Degas painted it in 1874, yes. Faure took delivery in November 1874, yes. But the First Impressionist Exhibition had already opened in April of that year and closed by May, and The Dance Class — still being finished, still in Degas’s studio with the first dance master under the paint — was not in it. The painting that hung in Nadar’s old photo studio that famous spring was a different Degas. The Dance Class missed it.

What it caught instead was the second one, two years later. In April 1876, the Impressionists held their Second Exhibition in Paris (at the galleries of the dealer Durand-Ruel, 11 rue Le Peletier — by coincidence the same street as the burned opera house from Chapter 2). And there, lent by Faure from his private collection, The Dance Classhung publicly for the first time. The catalogue listed it among Degas’s entries. By 1876 Faure was already in the habit of lending his Degas pictures to shows; he was a generous loaner, and the practice meant his collection helped underwrite Impressionism’s visibility in its earliest, scrappiest years.

A word about what “the Impressionist Exhibitions” were, because the word “exhibition” badly undersells them. The Impressionists were people who had been rejected from the Salon— the official annual state-run art exhibition in Paris, which was effectively the only door into a career. The Salon’s jury hated the loose brushwork, the bright color, the modern-life subjects, the unfinished look. So Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, Cézanne and the others did the thing the rejected always eventually do: they organized themselves and put on their own show. The first one, in 1874, was the manifesto. The second, in 1876, was the proof that it wasn’t a one-off. Eight exhibitions in total would run from 1874 to 1886. They were the engine that built Impressionism’s audience.

Degas was an awkward fit inside his own movement, and The Dance Class is a useful place to feel why. The painters most associated with Impressionism — Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley — were plein-air painters: they worked outdoors, in front of the actual light, chasing the sun across grain fields and harbors and gardens. Degas worked in his studio, from drawings and memory, in steady artificial-feeling light, on indoor subjects. He didn’t paint sunlight. He painted gaslight, daylight through a high window, the warm light of a café, the cool light of a rehearsal room. He didn’t think of himself as an “Impressionist” at all — he called his work Realism, in the sense the writer Émile Zola meant: unsentimental, modern, present-tense observation of ordinary life. And yet there he was, in every Impressionist Exhibition from the first to the eighth, hanging his pictures next to Monet’s harbors and Pissarro’s villages. Whatever you call him, he was in the room.

What The Dance Class did, hanging at the 1876 show, was put a flag down for what we might fairly call indoor Impressionism. While Monet’s outdoor pictures were dissolving cathedrals and harbors into colored light, Degas was insisting that modern life happened indoors too — in cafés, on rehearsal floors, in milliners’ shops, in laundries. The light was different, the brushwork could be a little tighter, the surface a little more drawn. But the project was the same: paint the actual world, the present-tenseworld, not a costume-drama version of it. The rehearsal room was, for Degas, what the harbor at dawn was for Monet — the real, working, modern subject that polite painting had been refusing to look at.

The 1876 reception of the painting was warm by the period’s standards, which mostly means it wasn’t loudly attacked. Several critics singled Degas out as the most interesting figure in the Second Exhibition. The novelist Edmond Duranty (1833–1880), a friend of Degas and the group’s most thoughtful in-house critic, that same year published a pamphlet — La Nouvelle Peinture (“The New Painting”) — arguing that the future of art lay in exactly the kind of unposed, modern, behind-the-scenes subject Degas was making his specialty. The pamphlet is, in effect, The Dance Class’s manifesto, written by the painter’s friend the same season the picture went on the wall. Other critics complained about the looseness, the cropping, the apparent casualness — the same complaints leveled at the whole movement. But the painting was visibly admired. It was, very quickly, recognized as one of the things Degas was about.

A small dryness worth pointing out, before we leave the room: that poster of Guillaume Tell on the back wall (Chapter 3) — the small printed sheet behind the dancers — was a private courtesy from Degas to his patron. Faure’s most famous stage role was the title part in Guillaume Tell. Degas slipped it into the back wall of the painting so that the man who paid for the picture would see, half-hidden in the décor of the rehearsal room, a tiny tribute to his own celebrity. Faure hung the painting in his apartment and was reportedly delighted with it. The first audience for The Dance Class, in other words, was an Opéra baritone admiring a private love note from his painter, with a watering can on the floor and a small dog by his foot.