Degas painted ballet classes during lessons and as the dancers rested far more often than he painted an actual performance, drawn to the ordinary, unguarded moments a paying audience never saw: a dancer exhausted from pushing her body too hard, straining to stretch a tired leg, stripped of the stage charm a performance would have given her^[1]. Hundreds of drawings survive in his sketchbooks recording dancers' arms and legs caught mid-motion, material he drew on repeatedly across different finished compositions rather than treating any single sketch as belonging to one picture alone^[1].

Real ballet practice dress in this period included knee-length calico bloomers, worn under the tutu and considered standard until the turn of the century, yet Degas suppressed them in the great majority of his dancer studies, favouring a smoother, more idealised silhouette instead^[2]. He showed the undergarment only occasionally, and then with a fastidiousness that suggests deliberate discretion rather than oversight^[2]. Later imitators such as Paul Renouard, whose 1890s prints borrowed heavily from Degas's compositions, had no such reticence, showing dancers' underclothes with a prurience Degas consistently avoided even as his own work aimed at documentary honesty about the dancer's working life^[2].

Degas often built a rehearsal-room composition from a single dancer observed closely in the studio, then repeated and adjusted her figure to suggest a fuller room than any one sitting could have shown him, adding background dancers with less individualised features to imply depth and scale rather than recording a real, simultaneous scene^[2]. He used delicate plumb lines in some of these pastels, marked at a slipper's toe or an elbow, to fix the position of the principal figure precisely before building the rest of the composition around her, a working method that shows how deliberately constructed even his most seemingly casual rehearsal scenes actually were^[2].