About this work
The scene draws you directly into the great hall of Paris's Opéra Le Peletier, where ten ballerinas are assembled for examination under the eye of their instructor. At the center stands the white-clad Louis François Mérante, the opera's ballet master, issuing commands the dancers must follow.
He holds a stick but, still young here, does not need to lean on it — his left hand raised in an almost hieratic gesture of authority. The palette is restrained and architectural: creams, grays, and the soft white of the tutus punctuated by the dancers' dark hair. A great arched mirror occupies the central background, lending the whole composition a classical, measured quality — the room doubling back on itself, the figures multiplied in reflection. It is a small canvas — just 32.6 × 47.2 cm in oil on canvas — but it holds the full weight of an institution.
Painted in 1872 and now held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris , this work arrives at a pivotal moment. The Opéra Le Peletier was a place Degas had frequented in his youth , and he would return to it obsessively in paint long after its destruction — not to reproduce its architecture in faithful detail, but to capture the spirit of those who moved through it.
The painting belongs to an extraordinary run of multi-figure compositions from the early 1870s, all focused on the incidental or the moment of anticipation — a young dancer about to perform a step, the top-hatted silhouette of a standing man in a room crowded with young ballerinas.
The foyer itself carried a double life: officially the site of classes, rehearsals, and examinations, it was also widely associated with encounters between dancers and wealthy subscribers. Degas renders it without sentimentality — the discipline on display is real, and the hierarchy between the male instructor and his female charges is quietly, precisely observed.
This is a painting for someone who prefers their walls to ask something of them. Where other artists of the period were drawn to the glamour and spectacle of ballet, Degas went instead to the heart of the world of dance — and that inward gravity comes through even at domestic scale. It works particularly well in a study, a library, or a sitting room with warm natural light: the muted palette and interior setting absorb rather than compete. The viewer who lingers will find it growing stranger and more charged with each return — ten figures held in a moment of scrutiny, watched by a man with a raised hand, and watched again in the mirror behind him.
