The Dance Class is a ballet lesson at the old Paris Opera, painted by Edgar Degas in 1874 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. About two dozen dancers and mothers wait in a long rehearsal room while one girl performs an attitude for her examination and a famous ballet master conducts the class.
When the picture was first shown in public, in 1876, it carried a different title: Examen de danse, a dance examination. The room is the rehearsal hall of the old Opera on rue Le Peletier.
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And that rehearsal hall was already gone when Degas painted it. The old Opera burned to the ground in 1873, and the Met's catalogue calls the scene imagined. Degas had been brought into the dance foyer there by a friend from the orchestra, and he began this subject in late 1873, the year the building burned. He was painting a room he could no longer enter.
The painting also has a twin. A very similar canvas hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the Met says the pair are the most ambitious paintings Degas ever made on the theme of dance. One of them was made for a singer, and Degas hung a tribute to him on the wall.
What You'll Discover
Who the ballet master really was.
Who the poster on the wall honors.
Which twin Degas began first.
Where the other twin ended up.