Description
Year of creation: c. 1878
Original size: 76.8 cm x 82.2 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. W1937-2-1)
The Ballet Class – Edgar Degas
A rehearsal room seen from a high point, so that the floor takes up almost half the canvas. At the upper left, through a wide opening, four dancers practise: one lifts a leg, another wears an orange sash at the waist, the skirts are pale green and white. Our canvas painting keeps that unusual relation between empty parquet and a cluster of bodies at the edge.
The view from above
Degas places the viewer above the scene rather than in front of it. The floor rises towards the upper edge, the boards run diagonally across the whole lower half, and the figures are pushed into the upper left and right corners. The empty space in the middle is not a shortcoming but the main subject: the room is larger than what happens inside it.
The group at the right
At the right stands a group – a balding older man in dark clothes, a dancer with long fair hair down her back, and a few more white skirts. Behind the dancers in the background is a window with city roofs, which sets the scene in a real city rather than a neutral space. The same practice at the barre is shown by the dancers at the barre, and the moment before going on stage by the ballet dancers in the wings.
The mother reading a newspaper
In the foreground, on a wooden chair, sits a woman in a blue-violet dress with a hat and a yellow ribbon, reading a newspaper. That figure is what decides the scene: Degas does not paint the performance but the waiting beside it. The mother came with her daughter and reads meanwhile; ballet is somebody else’s work to her. The signature is at the lower left, the canvas measures 76.8 x 82.2 cm, and it is today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
