A long, brightly lit room is filled with at least nine young ballerinas in robin’s egg-blue dance costumes and pale pink shoes in this wide, horizontal painting. They all have light skin and brown or dark blond hair. The studio is lit from the left, and more light pours in through two windows toward the back. The wall closest to us is mint green with brown wainscoting covering the lower half, and a small mirror hanging a short distance down the wall. The walls of the space farther from us and the scuffed, worn floor are both painted with tan layered with washes of moss green and denim blue.
A dancer in the lower left faces us and sits near a cello lying on the floor. The instrument’s curved upper body and neck emerge from the tutu near her left hip, on our right. She leans forward with her right arm, on our left, draped across her lap, and she rests her head on the other hand, propped up on her elbow. We look slightly down on her so only see the top of her head and the point of her nose. She wears a red jacket with her ice-blue, knee-length tutu spread around her. Her splayed feet are cropped by the bottom edge of the canvas.
In the center are two dancers, one seated and the other standing. The seated girl is perched on a wooden chair with the back of her tutu draped over its top. She also wears a petal-pink jacket dotted with darker mauve. She gazes at the girl in front of her. That girl stands with her back to us, bowing her head slightly as she adjusts the bow of her emerald-green belt at the small of her back. At least six more dancers sit or stand along the far wall, in the upper right corner of the composition. One looks down at her tutu spread wide between her hands, and another holds a canary-yellow fan up to her face. The features of this group are loosely painted, making them indistinct. The artist signed the lower right, “Degas.”
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Degas' best-known works are those inspired by the ballet. For an artist committed to the depiction of modern life, the theater in all of its forms--the ballet, the opera, even the more raucous café-concerts--held a special
appeal. What intrigued him the most, however, was not the formal, polished performance, but rather the behind-the-scenes, casual, candid moments of dancers rehearsing or resting. It is a theme that the artist was to
explore time and again, not only in his ballet paintings but also in his horse-racing scenes.
Painted c. 1879, The Dance Lesson is the first ballet scene in a distinctive group of some forty pictures, all executed in an unusual horizontal format. Degas had already begun to experiment with this format in some of
his racing scenes in order to create an almost panoramic sense of space. In the ballet scenes, the setting was transformed into an oblong rehearsal room populated by dancers in various states of activity and exhaustion.
This format, which has been likened to a frieze, has a decidedly decorative quality. Degas' fascination with the unexpected views and flattened forms of Japanese prints is also apparent: figures are sharply cropped
and placed off center, while the floor, which dominates the scene, seems tipped upward, an illusion that is accentuated by the elongated format.
Like most of his ballet scenes, The Dance Lesson is a deceptively straightforward image. Although the overall effect seems spontaneous, the picture was carefully orchestrated from start to finish. Degas produced a compositional
sketch in one of his notebooks (possibly after he had already started the painting), laying out several crucial components: the seated figure at the center, the window at the far right, and the double bass and open
violin case at the far left. Into this basic framework he then introduced the figures of other dancers. Pulled from a number of his drawings and other paintings, these figures, like mannequins, were moved and arranged
in artful configurations. The dancer adjusting her bow, for example, appears not only in a number of pastels but also in several paintings from this group of friezelike compositions (The Detroit Institute of Arts, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Even after the forms had been placed within the composition, they were subject to change. Degas altered a number of details, many still visible to the naked eye: the angle of the
seated dancer's foot; the positioning of the legs and back of the chair; and the violin case, which the artist painted out at an early stage.
When shown in the fifth impressionist exhibition in 1880, The Dance Lesson passed largely unnoticed, and what commentary it elicited was equivocal. The critic Joris Karl Huysmans admired other works Degas exhibited and
praised the artist's keen observational skills. Nevertheless, he characterized this painting as "dismal," though more in response to the mood than to the execution. Paul Mantz, troubled by the artist's tendency
to slip into caricature, was less enthusiastic, though he did praise its "transparently fine atmosphere."
(Text by Kimberly Jones, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
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