The Ballet from "Robert le Diable"

The Ballet from 'Robert le Diable', painted in 1876 and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, depicts a scene from Meyerbeer's opera Robert le Diable — specifically the famous Act III ballet of ghostly nuns who rise from their graves to dance. Degas painted this opera subject twice, both versions showing the same view from a box above the stage, with the orchestra pit and audience visible in the foreground and the supernatural ballet taking place on the brilliantly lit stage below. The juxtaposition of the mundane world of the audience — with recognizable friends and fellow concert-goers — against the fantastic theatrical spectacle creates a characteristic Degas meditation on the distance between everyday life and art.

The composition divides between the domestic foreground — where audience members in formal wear observe from boxes and pit — and the magical stage beyond, where the ghostly ballet is rendered with an otherworldly luminosity. Degas handles the stage with deliberate atmospheric unreality: the lit backdrop glows, the dancing figures are spectral. His treatment of the foreground figures is more materially solid and particularized, creating a compelling tonal contrast between the real and the theatrical.