Edgar Degas - The Dance Class Cushion

The Dance Class (Examen de danse / La classe de danse), painted in 1874 in oil on canvas by French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. A young ballerina performs an exercise while other dancers and accompanying women wait around the room under the direction of veteran ballet master Jules Perrot. Degas arranges roughly two dozen figures in an apparently casual pattern, but the floorboards, walls and scattered bodies guide the eye through a carefully constructed space. The setting evokes the old Paris Opéra on the rue Le Peletier, which had been destroyed by fire shortly before the painting was completed. Opera singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned the work, one of the relatively few direct commissions Degas accepted. A poster for Rossini's Guillaume Tell pays tribute to Faure, who sang the role, and he later lent the painting to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition.