Painters have shown music and dance in three ways: an instrument that carries a hidden meaning, a musician painted as a portrait, and a dancer caught in a pause. Titian, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Degas, Matisse and Poussin each found their own answer, and each kind has its own gallery of famous works on this site.
A canvas makes no sound and holds no movement, so a painting of a concert or a ball can show only one instant. Painters differ in the instant they choose, and in the small thing they let stand in for the sound.
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Degas, the painter most tied to dancers, disliked the label. He told the dealer Ambroise Vollard that people called him the painter of dancing girls without ever realizing that his chief interest in dancers lay in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
In his best known classroom picture, The Dance Class, painted between 1873 and 1876, the movement is hard to find. The lesson is over. The girls stretch, scratch their backs and fix an earring. Only one figure is still at work, the teacher, an old man with a stick who is a portrait of the real ballet master Jules Perrot, and he looks on with little regard for their fatigue.
A painter who says his subject is movement has made a room full of dancers at rest. Whatever Degas set in motion has to be somewhere else in that picture, and the teacher's stick is worth remembering. The same hunt works on every painting of music and dance.
What You'll Discover
What Titian's organist does with his hands.
What Vermeer's guitar string is still doing.
What the old teacher's stick is for.
Why Matisse painted Dance twice.
What Time plays for Poussin's dancers.