Degas made a large number of drawings and paintings of dancers at the barre through the 1870s and 1880s, recording the repetitive, physically demanding exercises that formed the daily training behind a performance most theatregoers only ever saw in its finished state. This attention to labour rather than spectacle runs through his ballet work for decades, and the barre exercise, in particular, gave him a subject where a dancer's effort, rather than her costume or her audience, could carry the whole picture.

It was rare for a dancer to appear in Degas's work as an airy, weightless figure; more often she is shown simply as a woman worn out by pushing her body too hard, stretching a tired leg or straining at the barre, stripped of any stage charm^[1]. Degas paired this unglamorous physicality with scenes of waiting, the long stretches when a dancer sat exhausted, bent over with fatigue, before being seen by the theatre's director, a humiliation Degas recorded as bluntly as the exercise itself^[1]. This unsentimental treatment of the dancer's working body sits alongside Degas's other studies of women at repetitive physical labour, including his pictures of Parisian laundresses and ironers, where he found a comparable grace in mechanical, exhausting movement^[1].

The barre exercise recurs across Degas's ballet output for roughly two decades, treated in oil, pastel and charcoal, the poses varied but the underlying subject constant: a dancer's body positioned, stretched and held in place by the demands of technique rather than by any narrative or audience. Degas built many of his ballet compositions from figures observed and drawn repeatedly in the studio rather than during continuous observation of an actual class, reusing and adapting poses across multiple finished works over years.