Movement --- Day 13/186

Walk: Hood

Distance: 4 miles

Edgas Degas (French 1834-1917), The Dance Class, 1874, o/c, 32.7 x 30 "

So, as she packs up for her move, Ciwt thinks of Edgar Degas's paintings of ballet, another type of movement altogether.  In this one, The Dance Class, some twenty-four young ballerinas and their mothers wait in a rehearsal room of the old Paris Opera while a dancer executes an 'attitude' for her examination. Held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, along with a varient in Paris's Musee d'Orsay, The Dance Class is considered his most ambitious of the many he devoted to the theme of dance.. 

Degas's love of the Paris Opera, the Palais Garnier, and his many visits to its shows and rehearsal rooms is well known.  But not many know that Degas himself loved to dance. He is famously quoted about people calling him 'the painter of dancing girls' as saying 'It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.'