Degas made sketches of this composition in a notebook he used during his second stay in Rome in 1857–58. Originally conceived as a depiction of a pensive woman, the picture assumed a mysterious air when Degas added the imaginary Middle Eastern cityscape, the pink flowers, and the two red ibises around 1860–62. About the same time he also considered adding the brilliant birds to his large historical painting Semiramis Building Babylon (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Young Woman With Ibis
This work and its variant in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, represent the most ambitious paintings Degas devoted to the theme of the dance. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an "attitude" for her examination. Jules Perrot, a famous ballet master, conducts the class. The imaginary scene is set in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, which had recently burned to the ground. On the wall beside the mirror, a poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell pays tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition.
The Dance Class
This pastel is one of the most delicately executed and finely resolved of all Degas' studies of the nude. It belongs to a celebrated series of pastels of women at their toilette produced in the mid-1880s, a group of which was included in an exhibition of Impressionist painters in Paris in 1886. Critics varied in their reactions to these works. Some praised the way Degas showed plausible, modern women rather than idealized goddesses. Others complained of the models' ugliness and suggested they were prostitutes. In this pastel, however, there are no indications of the woman's social class or line of work.