The writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1873: “Yesterday I spent the afternoon in the studio of a painter named Degas. Out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers”. That same year Edgar Degas (1834–1917) would join forces with Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne, to exhibit paintings under the banner of Impressionism and would go on to achieve fame as one of the world’s great artists and renderers of movement. Half of his prodigious output (of 1200 or so works) depicted dancers and the world they inhabited, and he claimed the ballet for modern art as Cézanne claimed the landscape and Monet the haystacks and lilies.
In the 1870s Edgar Degas had become fascinated with ballet dancers, paying frequent visits to the magnificent Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opéra and its Ballet. He haunted the wings and stalked the classes where the Opèra’s ballet master, Jules Perrot, trained groups of young girls. He would be constantly sketching his observations and accumulating ideas for paintings to render later in his studio. Degas’s pictures of ballerinas performing onstage convey exquisitely the balance, grace and radiance of the dancers, whilst at other times, Degas stripped away the poetry and illusion to show the hard work behind the scenes: the hanging around, the stretching at the bar, the rubbing of sore muscles, the tying of shoes.
It is at this point that I should signal the need to separate art from reality, for the reality of the ballet was that it had a sordid underbelly. The dancers were usually young, poor, vulnerable and ripe for exploitation by abonnés, the name for wealthy male subscription holders who often lurked in the foyers, and there was more than a hint of prostitution (often with their mothers in collusion, desperate I suppose to push their daughters up the ladder). The glamour was only on the surface.
To defend Degas from the obvious fleeting thought, however (although his character may be called into question for various other reasons such as misanthropy and anti-semitism), it is understood that his relationship to the dancers was paternal and professional rather than predatory.
Of the several hundred Degas paintings to choose from, here’s one that features the old Perrot schooling his ballerinas in The Dance Class (1874), with the dancers in various stages of preparation. The girl on the left appears to be looking at her mobile phone!
