Edgar Degas: Dancers

Dancers first became Degas's subject with Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, shown at the Salon of 1868. From 1870 he painted ballet more and more, partly because it sold and the family needed money after his brother's debts, and in time dancers filled more than half of everything he made.

He turned to ballet while the Paris Opéra was in flux: the age of romantic ballet had run out in the late 1860s, few dancers were famous, and the names of the girls he painted often went unrecorded. Even the ballet master Jules Perrot, at the centre of The Ballet Class, was painted in partway through, over another teacher.

Look at where Degas puts you. In The Orchestra at the Opera only the dancers' legs and tutus show above the pit, cut off by the frame, a view one historian compares to a distracted spectator's glance. The near-colourless Ballet Rehearsal on Stage of 1874 has been linked to his interest in photography.