Edgar Degas

This was one of the first of his rehearsal-room pictures, painted when he'd started getting himself in behind the scenes at the Paris opera house through friends with subscriptions. The building he was working in burned down a few years later, from what I can find, so the room itself is long gone.

This one started out with a plainer name — something like 'In a Café' — before the nickname it's known by now took over, from what I can find.

It's his aunt's family, painted during a long stay in Florence. The marriage was, by most accounts, a miserable one, and she's dressed in black because she was mourning her own father — that's supposedly him in the little red drawing on the wall behind her.

Nobody has ever settled what's happening in here. It's carried two titles almost from the start, one of them far uglier than the other, and people have spent a century hunting for the novel it's supposed to illustrate without ever agreeing on which one.

It's pastel — chalk, basically — rather than paint, which I only found out looking it up, and it explains why the colour sits so grainy. He drew dancers for decades, apparently, mostly the standing-about parts rather than anything you'd buy a ticket for.

He'd gone over to visit his mother's family in New Orleans, who were in the cotton trade, and painted them at work — the men in here are supposedly relatives and their business partners. The plan, they say, was to sell it to a mill owner in England. That fell through, and it ended up being the first of his paintings a museum ever bought.

The man leaning on the cane is Jules Perrot, a real ballet master — apparently Degas painted him well after actually watching him teach a class like this one. The whole scene was reportedly commissioned by a composer, Jean-Baptiste Faure, not a museum.