#rehearsal

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.

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.