The Dance Class

1874

Edgar Degas

The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre Museum

Edgar Degas, The Dance Class (1874) — Photo via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and edited / Public Domain CC0 1.0

One of Degas's most ambitious dance-themed paintings, this work depicts about twenty-four women—ballerinas and their mothers—attending a class conducted by ballet master Jules Perrot. The scene is set in a rehearsal room of the old Paris Opéra, featuring a poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on the wall, which pays tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure who commissioned the piece.