About this work
What arrests you first is the figure at the centre of the sheet: a heavyset older man, planted solidly on both feet, leaning slightly on a long staff. This is Jules Perrot, silver-haired and authoritative, giving a private lesson.
Executed in oil paint on brown wove paper — an unusual and intimate support — the work measures just under nineteen by twelve inches, now held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The warm mid-tone of the paper itself acts as a third colour, unifying the subdued palette and giving the scene the feeling of a private study rather than a finished canvas. Perrot did not mind posing for Degas — sitting for his outfit, posture, and appearance — and the velvety texture of his flannel suit and the precise red reflections on his face speak to the careful attention Degas devoted to those sessions. Around him, the composition remains deliberately spare, the figure of Perrot carrying the entire psychological weight of the image: a man who commands a room simply by standing in it.
Degas based Perrot's figure on two earlier sketches — one in the Fitzwilliam Museum dating to around 1873, and a second, more fully realised oil sketch, signed and dated 1875, also at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This work was one of three major paintings centring on Jules Perrot that Degas produced between 1873 and 1876. The choice of subject carried real cultural resonance. Perrot was a French virtuoso dancer and master choreographer celebrated internationally for creating some of the most enduring ballets of the Romantic period.
He had retired after a disappointing season in Milan in 1864, and in his later years gave classes at the Paris Opéra, where Degas immortalised him.
Driven by nostalgia and loyalty to the old theatre, Degas enticed the former star and choreographer of the Romantic ballet out of retirement to resume the role of ballet master in his pictures. The work is, in that sense, a portrait inside a genre painting — a private tribute to a generation of dance that Paris was already beginning to forget.
As wall art, this is a piece for rooms that reward close looking — a study, a library, a hallway where something small and perfectly weighted holds the eye for longer than expected. The brown paper ground gives it a warmth that reads well in low or natural light, and its modest dimensions make it feel discovered rather than displayed. Degas's subject, more than the stage performance and the limelight, was always the training and the rehearsal — the private discipline behind the public spectacle. The viewer who lingers here will find something of that same quality in the image itself: a man at rest, but never off duty — the full authority of a life in dance held still,
