The Dance Class

The Dance Class (1874), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of Degas's most celebrated images — the enormous teaching studio of the Opéra, with its multiple groups of dancers at different stages of practice, a ballet master with his violin bow, and the scattered observation of waiting girls and their chaperones. The composition's radical distribution of figures across a large floor space, combined with the asymmetrical placement of the primary figure group, was a revelation when exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. No previous painter had depicted the systematic labour behind spectacular performance with such sociological precision.

The large studio floor is handled with careful perspectival precision, its wooden planks receding from an oblique left viewpoint that gives the composition its spatial drama. Figures are distributed in scattered groupings across this floor, some blurred with movement, others frozen in momentary stillness, creating a complex multi-temporal image of ongoing activity.