Edgar Degas The Ballet Class

Edgar Degas’ The Ballet Class

Edgar Degas was a wealthy impressionist painter who lived in Paris, France from 1831 to 1917. Degas studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and sometimes visited the Louvre museum often to look at the artworks of professionals. Before he died, he had a total of 1165 works, more than half of which depicted dancers. According to The Met Museum, “Degas helped to organize the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and participated in six of their eight exhibitions, but remained always independent in character and rarely worked out-of-doors.”. Degas’ The Ballet Class or, La Clase de Danse, was an oil painting on canvas that he worked on from 1871 to 1874. The Ballet Class was commissioned by a man named Jean-Baptiste Faure. The way Degas crops the painting gives it the feeling of a snapshot. According to The Encyclopedia of Art, Degas’ The Ballet Class is, “Regarded as one of

The repeated figures of the dancers and the three main shapes/columns on the the wall behind the figures that are much darker help unify the artwork. The similar tones in the ceiling and the floorboards also help unify his composition.

Some colors and tones are repeated in Degas’ artwork as well. The color of the flower in the most prominent dancers hair is repeated the the fan she is holding. The greenish color in the girl’s bow is repeated on another dancer’s sash and there is even a similar green on the wall behind them which also helps unify the composition. All of the dancers dresses are the same color.

The three different colored sashes in the dancer’s dresses and the staff shaped object on the far left of the painting provide some variety to the composition. There is a heavy contrast where the three main dark points on the wall behind the figures are and on the form in the bottom left corner on which one of the figures is