| Edgar Degas, Two Dancers on a Stage, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 46 cm (Courtauld Gallery, London). |
| Edgar Degas, Notebook 25, p. 29 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris). |
| Edgar Degas, Notebook 24, p. 27 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris). |
| Edgar Degas, Danseuse penchée en avant, 1873, charcoal heightened with white, 24.4 x 32.4 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, département des Arts graphiques du Musée du Louvre [RF 16725 recto]). |
| Edgar Degas, Seated Dancer, Profile View, Turning Toward the Right, ca. 1874, essence on blue paper, 22.8 x 29.7 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, département des Arts graphiques du Musée du Louvre [RF 16723]). |
| Edgar Degas, Danseuse Baillant (L402), ca. 1874 [here dated as], essence drawing on green Bristol board, 54 x 45 cm (whereabouts unknown). Lemoisne II, 402 |
| Edgar Degas, Standing Dancer, with Arm Raised (L401), ca. 1874 [here dated as], essence painting [or painting with solvent], 59 x 46 cm (formerly Maurice Exsteens collection, Paris) Lemoisne, II, 401 |
| Edgar Degas, A Ballet Dancer in Position Facing Three-Quarters Front, ca. 1872–73, graphite, prepared black chalk, white chalk, and touches of blue-green pastel on pink wove paper, squared in prepared black chalk, 41 x 27.6 cm (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge) |
| Edgar Degas, Répétition d’un ballet sur la scène, 1874, oil on canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). |
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| The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage |
Artist:Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)
Date:ca. 1874
Medium:Oil colors freely mixed with turpentine, with traces of watercolor and pastel over pen-and-ink drawing on cream-colored wove paper, laid down on bristol board and mounted on canvas
Dimensions:21 3/8 x 28 3/4 in. (54.3 x 73 cm)
Classification:Drawings
Credit Line:H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Gift of Horace Havemeyer, 1929
There are three similar versions of this scene, and their precise relationship has bedeviled scholars for decades. The largest, painted in grisaille (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The two others, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan’s collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel (29.100.39), which is more freely handled. The importance that Degas attached to the composition is evident in the preparatory drawings that he made for almost every figure, from the dancer scratching her back in the foreground to the woman yawning next to the stage flat.
Catalogue Entry
The Painting: This very unusual mixed-media picture shows a rehearsal for a ballet. The view is from a slightly elevated point above the orchestra pit; the scrolls of two double basses are just visible in the foreground, radically cropped at the bottom of the canvas. At left dancers wait in the wings, while other dancers rehearse at center stage. The ballet master in a black suit at midground leads the motion on stage with his fingers, like a conductor. Two male abonnés (season subscribers) sit at the far right of the stage. The painting incorporates the use of the solvent turpentine with oil paint, ink drawing, pastel, and watercolor (see Technical Notes). It is related to several other works by Degas discussed below.
During rehearsals for a short ballet within Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni on the Paris Opéra’s stage in the mid-1870s, Degas found himself entranced by the action both onstage and in the wings. In fact, one art historian (Armstrong 1991) has gone so far as to say that "in almost all of the dance pictures exhibited between 1874 and 1886, there are only small groups of dancers actually dancing, and they are invariably surrounded . . . by a crowd of very different occupations: stretching, yawning, scratching, looking distractedly around." To these activities, in The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, one might add tying a ballet shoe, the ballet master’s gesturing to the dancers, the implied music-making coming from the orchestra pit (for which the two double-bass scrolls serve as stand-in), and the watchful waiting of the ready-to-pounce abonnés. Male subscribers to the opera in Paris had a long history of seeking out companionship from the young dancers of the ballet corps. They were often given access to watch rehearsals from the wings and to wait backstage at performances for the dancers to finish so that they might escort the girls afterward. For the impressionable and often poor ballerinas, such men could be seen as their "sugar daddies."
The British writer George Moore (1891) recounted that the picture had been rejected by the Illustrated London News because of the impropriety of the image. The periodical circulated through a church rectory group, and, no doubt, the proximity of dancers with bare arms and legs to the well-dressed abonnés was too much for their readers. These male figures alternately stretch out to relax as if at home or sit casually backwards in a chair, attentive to each possible revelation of skin the dancers might provide. Moore recalled that when Degas’s drawing was returned to him, the painter began to add oil paint thinly over the original drawing. Moore’s statement about what happened to the original drawing has led to the identification of this version with the submission to the periodical, as opposed to The Met’s pastel version (29.100.39) or the version in camaïeu (monochrome painting) in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay (see fig. 1 above) (discussed below).
Degas keeps the viewer’s eyes in motion, darting from figure to figure with little attention paid (or, in turn, to be paid by the viewer) to the opera scenery. He enacts this strategy by bringing our attention first to the dancers waiting in the wings at left for their cue to enter, then to the yawning dancer with arms akimbo just beyond them, to the two dancers centrally located but depicted at upstage right already in position, then to the dancer with a fanciful blue ribbon around her tutu seated on a bench at left and mindlessly scratching her back, to the lively central two dancers caught as if in mid-movement, and, finally, to the "two dilettanti of the boulevard stretch[ing] themselves at ease to watch the work" (Meynell 1882) at far right below the opera stalls. What interested Degas most about hanging around the ballet of the Paris Opéra was the ability to catch the body in motion unawares. A rehearsal on the stage was a prime opportunity for making such observations.
Browse (1949) identified the theater depicted as the stage of the Salle de la Rue Le Peletier, the site of the Paris Opéra until it burned down on October 28, 1873. Despite the ballet rehearsing after that point, first, temporarily at the Salle Ventadour and then, from 1875 on, in Garnier’s new opera house, Degas chose to present this scene as he had perhaps first observed it, at the rue le Peletier. Browse also tentatively identified the ballet master as Eugène Coralli (included in The Met, 2005.100.588.1.115), a dancer and mime who was the son and pupil of the more famous dancer and choreographer Jean Coralli and who served as Régisseur de la Danse of the opera ballet in the period. She noted his presence, too, in Degas’s Rehearsal in the Studio (ca. 1878–79, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont). (For more background on Degas and the Opéra ballet, see the online catalogue entry for The Dance Class, also 1874 [The Met, 1987.47.1], under "The Paris Opéra Ballet.") DeVonyar and Kendall (2002) identified the actual ballet divertissement for which the performers rehearse as the "Ballet des Roses" from Don Giovanni (in French, Don Juan) on the bases of matching costume designs, contemporary photography, and scenery details that included theater flats depicting trees and shrubbery. The ballet revolved around a tale of love between butterflies and roses. DeVonyar and Kendall identified the season as most likely summer from the resting dancers’ lack of shawls. They noted that Degas probably began the series before the October 1873 fire or painted them rapidly from memory within months of the fire. They also noted the artist took a viewpoint from the first-level balcony at left of the stage, which was a special location traditionally reserved for the emperor or high-level dignitaries. Finally, they observed the presence of a trestle or gantry, typically used as scene-painting equipment in the period, in the background of the painting.
The British painter Walter Sickert acquired the picture at the estate sale of Captain Henry Hill of Brighton at Christie’s London in 1889. When Sickert’s wife lent it to the New English Art Club two years later, the critic D. S. MacColl (December 5, 1891) called it "a demonstration against all pedantry of technique; begun in black-and-white for an illustrated paper, it has somehow been transformed into colour by what may, for aught one can tell, be a mixture of body-colour, pastel, and oils; the effect is obtained, and that is the only law." MacColl found the technique of less interest than the effect it created, but, for Degas, the process was intimately connected to the final effect.
Studies for the Painting: Degas made several studies for a number of the figures in this scene. In the first sale of his estate, a study in pastel of a Dancer (L426, whereabouts unknown) presents a figure in the same stance as the central dancer en pointe. In the same sale, a graphite, black and white chalk, and pastel drawing squared for transfer (fig. 2) has been associated with the dancer who enters upstage at right along with another dancer behind her. Standing Dancer, with Arm Raised (L401, fig. 3), a study for the dancer at far left who looks down and raises her arm to hold on to a flat, appeared in the second sale of Degas’s estate (1918). From the same sale, a charcoal study for the yawning dancer at left (whereabouts unknown) is very similar to the study in essence Danseuse Baillant (L402, fig. 4; whereabouts unknown). Two studies for the seated dancer with braided strawberry-blonde hair scratching her back are in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay (figs. 5, 6). The third sale of Degas’s estate (1919) included a study for the man stretched out with his hands in his pockets, and another for the ballet master (III: 113; Browse 1949, figs. 30a and 31a). Finally, in his notebooks, we can find much evidence of the painter’s close study of the opera house stalls and double-bass scrolls (see figs. 7, 8, and Nb. 24, p. 1; see Reff 1976, vol. 1, p. 21, on the painter’s process in using these studies).
The Series of Three Rehearsal Onstage Scenes: The camaïeu version of the subject (fig. 1) appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Boggs and Maheux (1992) suggested that Degas submitted the camaïeu to the Illustrated London News because of its resemblance to the monochrome colors of the etching format. Grisaille (grey-toned) paintings, similar to the Orsay camaïeu, typically were employed by painters for this purpose. (The work is Degas’s only monochrome painting [Pantazzi 1988].) Similarly, Richard Kendall’s (1985) early thoughts on the series had the Orsay picture first because of his theory of the artist moving through a process from black-and-white tonalism to color. However, Moore, a close friend to Degas from at least 1875 on, discussed the aftermath of Degas’s rejection from the publication in such specific terms that it seems hard to believe that he would have confused the two canvases. Moore recounted in The Speaker (1891): "upon having his drawing returned to him Degas began painting upon it in oil, very thinly—so thinly that the original drawing is still visible through the paint." One has the impression that Moore may even have witnessed this unorthodox transformation of the canvas. Degas’s friend Sickert also noted later (1932) that it was the same work that had been submitted to the Illustrated London News, rejected by their rectory circulation, and painted in oil afterwards.
A key part of Degas’s process was streamlining the composition between the three versions of the scene. The Met’s pastel version includes only one bass scroll, focuses even less on the set design, and reduces the number of figures at both left and right waiting in the wings. By the time the artist took up the monochrome version, he included no scenery at right and reduced the number of men in the scene to the single top-hatted gentleman who focuses intensely on the dancers. Pentimenti in the Orsay version, however, reveal traces of the original design, with the ballet master and second onlooker still visible to those who search for them. Once using a larger format, Degas was able to include the curve of the front of the stage (see Pickvance 1963). For more on the order of the three versions, see "Technical Notes" below.
Related Works: The painting Two Dancers on a Stage (fig. 9) in the Courtauld Gallery, London, is directly related to the two dancers at middle right in the rehearsal compositions. Just beyond those two figures at far left in the London work is the sharply cropped image of a third dancer in tutu and pink bodice or sash just beyond the green background that matches the flats in The Met’s two Rehearsal pictures. The figure at right with a green sash takes a more open fourth position pose with arms outstretched, while the central dancer’s en pointe pose is nearly identical to that of The Met’s central dancer. DeVonyar and Kendall (2002) were able to identify the piece in rehearsal with the help of the rosebud- and sepal-decorated bell-shaped costumes visible in the London canvas. In choosing not to specify the name of the ballet, as he did earlier in Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet "La Source" (Portrait de Mlle...E[ugénie] F[iocre]: à propos du ballet "La Source") (ca. 1867-68, Brooklyn Museum), Degas moved beyond creating what some might have seen as mere records of the performances to opportunities for creative license (DeVonyar and Kendall 2002, p. 158). Where the London picture presents costumes from the performance (with some liberty taken in their translation into paint), the Rehearsal series’ simpler white tutus reflect common classroom attire worn for rehearsals other than dress rehearsals.
Degas based the central figure in Ballet Rehearsal (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) on that of the Rehearsal series as well as the Courtauld picture, but reverses her pose. The artist also completed his first monotype, The Ballet Master (ca. 1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington), after the Kansas City picture.
Technical Notes: The most frequently exhibited and illustrated of his dance pictures before 1900, this painting has been called "technically unique" in Degas’s oeuvre (Pickvance 1963). In truth, his use of mixed media was more than a touch unorthodox; for 1874, it was downright revolutionary. The idea of taking one’s pen-and-ink drawing and laying different types of paint and pastel on top of it is something we might expect of artists working a century later who have been known to experiment with various media, such as Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930). Johns, himself, has admired Degas’s work and was inspired by his predecessor’s playful approach to mixed media, particularly when following in Degas’s footsteps to explore monotype prints. The incorporation of the solvent turpentine to thin out oil paint, in a technique known as peinture à l’essence, was first explored in oil studies during the Renaissance but it was revived and extended to final paintings by Degas. (See Denis Rouart, Degas: A la recherche de sa technique, Paris, 1945, pp. 14–15.) The relatively early investigations into mixed media in this picture only emboldened Degas to push further by adding pastel to his monotypes of the 1890s and by using such found objects as human hair, silk and linen ribbon, a cotton faille bodice, cotton and silk tutu, and linen slippers in his wax sculpture Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old (1878–81, National Gallery of Art, Washington). Before he risked exhibiting the Little Dancer at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Degas’s experimental combination of media in Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage served as an artist’s private exploration of mixing media. (The Little Dancer was the only sculpture he would exhibit in his lifetime and the source of much criticism in the press.) Perhaps because of this radical rumination on media, Degas does not appear to have exhibited this version of the subject in Paris until the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, choosing to test the waters first by showing it abroad at the Deschamps Gallery in London in 1876. (For more on Degas’s experiments in mixed media, see Ann Hoenigswald and Kimberly A. Jones, "’All the Vocabularies of Painting’: Adaptation and Experimentation, 1878–1879," Degas/Cassatt, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2014, pp. 119–21.)
As reported in Pantazzi (1988), the Degas Pastel Project, led by Anne Maheux and Peter Zegers at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, examined closely the extensive underdrawing partially visible to the naked eye in The Met’s two Rehearsal works on paper mounted on canvas. It was because of the "uncommon precision" of the ink drawing under the present version that Pantazzi subscribed to the idea that the picture was initially the model for the notional print. He noted that the scenery and figures are carefully outlined and that closely hatched lines indicated values. When examined under infrared light, even more details came to the fore; for example, the ballet master’s fingernails are visible. In The Met’s pastel version, by contrast, the ink drawing includes only ruled architectural outlines and "quite freely, even hesitantly, drawn" outlines of the two dancers at right and little shading. Pantazzi concluded that the ink drawing under The Met’s pastel version was actually an earlier attempt at the composition than the ink drawing under the present painting because of the more cursory underdrawing in the pastel version and because of changes to one figure between the two drawings. The central dancer en pointe in the pastel version was originally drawn with her right arm raised, as in a charcoal drawing (III:115.1), but was corrected in ink to a lowered-arm pose. In the present version, by contrast, her arm appears in that lowered pose with no correction.
Given these discoveries, Pantazzi concluded that the order of creation was: the ink drawing under the pastel, the ink drawing under this picture, the camaïeu (1873–74), this picture reworked in color (perhaps 1874), and the final pastel (perhaps 1874). He also noted that the Degas Pastel Project had found that some areas were drawn over in ink after paint had been applied, a technique that "appears to be unique in Degas’s work."
Jane R. Becker 2016
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