The foyer de la danse was the Paris Opera's dedicated rehearsal room, where dancers warmed up, took class and waited between calls, distinct from both the stage and the dressing rooms. Degas made it one of his most persistent settings, returning to it across the 1870s and after, drawn to how it combined the disciplined structure of a dance class with the informal waiting, adjusting and resting that filled the time around it^[1]. A ballet master, dressed in white and carrying a staff in at least one such picture, directs a pupil at one side of the room, while other dancers appear only as reflections in an arched mirror on the wall, a device that suggests a far larger space of ongoing practice than the canvas itself contains^[1].

Degas's earliest rehearsal-room paintings, made around 1871, are notably small and highly finished, with a jewel-like surface and meticulous drawing that recalls the fetes galantes of Watteau, Lancret and Pater far more than it resembles the loose brushwork associated with his Impressionist contemporaries^[1]. Light entering from a hidden window or door, and reflected again in a mirror leading to an unseen space beyond, has also been compared to the quiet, light-struck interiors of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting^[1]. This debt to older art sits oddly alongside the thoroughly modern subject: a working rehearsal room in a contemporary Parisian theatre, observed with the same care an earlier painter might have given a courtly garden scene.

In his stage and orchestra pictures of the same years, Degas often built the composition around an implied spectator, a subscriber to the Opera watching from a specific seat. In his rehearsal-room pictures he withheld that device: the point of view in a scene like this one is not clearly assigned to any particular class or gender of onlooker, and could as easily belong to a dancer moving through the room as to a visitor granted backstage access^[1]. This absence of a fixed narrator became more pronounced across Degas's career, and the rehearsal room, more than any other single setting, is the one he returned to most often over the following decades, described by one scholar as the theme upon which he composed innumerable variations for the rest of his working life^[1].