[Analysis] Edgar Degas’s “The Rehearsal,” picturing ballet dancers practicing at a Paris Opera studio, impeccably conveys the Impressionist’s great passion for the opera in general and for ballerinas in particular.
Depicting a group of young Parisian ballet dancers practicing to the tunes of a violinist, “The Rehearsal” can be considered one of Edgar Degas’s most renowned ballet pieces. Until October 2020, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the oil-on-canvas work in the context of its well-attended exhibition “Degas at the Opera.” Created around 1873–1878, the horizontal genre piece belongs to the bequest of late American financier and philanthropist Maurice Wertheim, who posthumously donated his comprehensive collection of French Impressionist works to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
In detail, Degas’s canvas shows ten petite female ballet dancers rehearsing at a spacious Paris Opera studio. An elderly violinist accompanies the girls, absorbed in playing his wooden fiddle. The dancers’ white tutus with light-pink, dark-red, orange, and mint-green belt loops clearly stand out from the battered, gray-brown studio walls. While four ballerinas in the front attentively practice a specific position — right legs stretched upward, arms outstretched — two dancers appear to be rehearsing their own moves; two other ballerinas, in contrast, seem to be going into a huddle by a large arched window.
It can be considered noteworthy that roughly half of the room is left empty, giving the canvas a quite unique touch. Moreover, the colors white (tutus) and gray-brown (floor, walls) dominate the scenery; the vivid belt bows on the dancers’ tutus alone add a few splashes of color to the tableau. A further noticeable detail: the violinist sitting at the left corner of the canvas is cropped at the edge. This feature strongly reminds of techniques applied by photographers and is rarely seen in paintings. A closer look at the piece furthermore reveals a penciled grid underneath the paint layer, which Degas simply used for the preparation of his work.
In “The Rehearsal,” Degas applied various generic Impressionist features such as blurred lines, imprecise facial characteristics, and the display of motion. However, the “Rehearsal” was, in contrast to most Impressionist pieces, painted inside. This can be defined as a recognizable feature of the artist, who by and large felt he belonged to the Impressionists but did not share their passion for plein-air (open-air) painting. The study of the effects of light and shadows, typical Impressionist characteristics, can nevertheless be spotted in this work.
Degas created “The Rehearsal” at the age of about forty, in the prime of his career. The world of the Paris Opera Ballet was the Impressionist’s favorite setting — his passion for ballerinas can be clearly perceived when contemplating this piece.
