Dance and Ballet Paintings for Sale

Degas and the dance class

Edgar Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings, and no painter is more closely tied to dance. The Ballet Class is an oil painting on canvas created between 1874 and 1876. It shows a group of dancers at the end of a lesson, led by the ballet master Jules Perrot, and it hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It was commissioned by the composer Jean-Baptiste Faure, and it closely resembles The Dance Class, which Degas also painted in 1874.

What makes these Degas works hold up as reproductions is that they are not portraits of a performance. They are pictures of the work behind it: a barre, a practice room, a dancer tying a ribbon, a master counting. That is why a Degas reads as calm on a wall even though the subject is movement. If you want the theatre rather than the practice room, Two Dancers on Stage is the one to look at, with the footlights coming from below.

Order more than one and the group holds together, because Degas kept returning to the same room. Two canvases in the same size, side by side, is the arrangement most people choose for a dance pair.

Choosing a dance painting for sale

Every dance painting for sale here is made to order, so the choice is about subject and size rather than about stock. Three questions settle it. Do you want the practice room or the theatre? A quiet subject looks best where people sit close, and a loud one wants a larger wall. Do you want a single figure or a group? A seated dancer or a young ballerina at the barre works in a narrow space beside a door, while a group of dancers needs a clear run of wall. And what style does the room already have? An academic allegory in a formal room, an Impressionist ball in a family room, a Bruegel village scene in a kitchen or a dining room.

If you are buying for a school of the arts or a piano room, the usual order is three canvases in the same size from the same painter, hung in a row with a single frame model. It reads as one work instead of three.

Before you order a dance painting

Which dance painting is the best known? The Ballet Class by Degas, painted between 1874 and 1876 and now in the Musee d'Orsay, is the one most people recognise, and it is the best selling Degas in our catalogue.

Are these dance paintings hand-painted? Yes. Each one is painted in oil on canvas by a studio artist and photographed for your approval before it leaves the workshop. We print nothing.

Can I order two dancers as a pair? Yes. Degas painted the same rehearsal room many times, so two canvases in the same size and frame hang together as a set without clashing.