Most paintings of ballet in the 1870s showed the performance. Degas preferred the rehearsal room. In The Dance Class he shows young dancers waiting their turn while an old teacher leans on a cane, and nobody is posing for the viewer.
The man in the center is the ballet master Jules Perrot, a famous dancer and choreographer of the previous generation. Around him the girls stretch, rest, fidget and adjust their dresses. One scratches her back. The scene feels as if the viewer has stepped into the room and the class has not yet noticed.
Degas did not work from the room itself. He visited the Paris Opera repeatedly to draw the dancers, and he built the composition in his studio from sketches and memory, arranging the figures so that the eye moves along the polished floor to the group at the back. The unequal spacing and the figures cut off by the edge of the canvas look like a snapshot, and they were carefully planned.
The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Degas painted a second, similar Dance Class in the same years, which is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Degas' The Dance Class appears on our: