Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), the eldest son of a wealthy banker, studied painting with a pupil of Ingres, attended the École des beaux-Arts, and traveled extensively in Italy, but eventually rejected classicism in favor of Impressionism – or, at least, in favor of Impressionist subject matter. Unlike Monet, who personifies Impressionism for most museum-goers, Degas was not concerned with light and atmosphere. Indeed, he specialized in indoor subjects and made many preliminary studies for his finished paintings. Degas’ interests were primarily recording body movement and exploring unusual angles of viewing. He was fascinated by the formalized patterns of motion of the classical ballet performed at the Paris Opéra and with the training of ballerinas at its ballet school.

The Rehearsal is perhaps Degas’ finest painting of this genre. In it and similar works, he recorded with care the unstable postures of the ballerinas, who stretch, bend, and swivel. But most of the dancers are hidden from the viewer by other figures or by the spiral stairway at the left. The Rehearsal is the antithesis of a classically balanced composition. The center is empty, and the floor takes up most of the canvas surface. At the margins, Degas arranged the ballerinas and their teachers in a seemingly random manner. As in other Impressionist paintings, the cutting off of figures at the left and right enhances the sense that the viewer is witnessing a fleeting moment. The implied position of that viewer is in a balcony looking down at the figures, as opposed to the head-on views of statuesque figures that were the norm in traditional paintings.

Because of his interest in patterns of movement, Degas became fascinated by photography and regularly used a camera to make preliminary studies for his works. Japanese woodblock prints were another inspirational source for paintings such as The Rehearsal. Japanese artists used diverging lines not only to organize the flat shapes of figures but also to direct the viewer’s attention into the picture space.^[1]