Degas, who was still alive when Henry Clay Frick acquired this painting, in 1914, is probably best known for his depictions of dancers like these young women, rehearsing in a room thought to be in the old Paris Opera House. This is one of a number of rehearsal scenes by the artist set in this space. The violinist’s dark attire and weathered face contrast sharply with the colorful, doll-faced young women, who have been likened to puppets suspended from strings. The artist enhances the sense of his proximity to the figures through a sharp tilting of the floor and close cropping of the violinist and a fourth dancer at right, represented only by a lower leg and not quite perfectly pointed foot. A contemporary critic referred to the “special beauty” of Degas’s dancers, “compounded of plebeian coarseness and of grace.”
This is one of the few paintings Henry Clay Frick loaned during his lifetime. In 1915, he sent it to be included in an exhibition to support efforts to win women’s right to vote, organized by his friend and fellow collector Louisine Havemeyer, herself an ardent suffragette.
The Rehearsal
This painting is probably the canvas entitled École de danse that Degas entered in the fourth exhibition of the Impressionists in 1879. It then belonged to the artist’s close friend Henri Rouart, and it was sold after Rouart’s death in 1912 along with a number of other important works by Degas. Mr. Frick was the next private individual to own it, acquiring the painting a year and a half later.
The Rehearsal is one of many compositions devoted to the dance that the artist produced in the 1870s, apparently fascinated with the mechanization of the human body that the rigorous discipline of the ballet imposed. In the same exhibition of 1879 Degas showed two other pictures of dancers practicing with a violinist. In all of them the unidentified musician appears divorced from the events surrounding him, his age and stolid form providing a touching contrast to the doll-like ballerinas.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Henri Rouart. His sale, December 9–11, 1912, Galerie Manzi, Paris, Lot 176, as Répétition de danse, sold for 165,000 francs to Knoedler. Frick, 1914.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: French, Italian and Spanish. Volume II. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
