(
Racehorses in front of the Tribunes).
Around the middle of the 1860s Degas made yet another discovery. In 1866, he painted his first composition with ballet as a subject: Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source“. Degas frequently attended the Paris Opera, where, in 1866, Eugénie Fiocre often danced The Spring. It’s true that, in this first painting, the ballet itself was not yet depicted. It was more a portrait of the ballet dancer. Mlle Fiocre is seated on stage surrounded by Oriental scenery with a horse at her side. Degas had always been a devotee of the theatre, but from this time on, it would become more and more the focus of his art. It gradually permeated his painting through his portraiture. After Mlle Fiocre, he turned to painting portraits of musicians.
In 1869 he did an admirable portrait of his father with Lorenzo Pagans, the musician: Degas’ Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar. Pagans occupies the foreground, wholly absorbed in his music, a guitar in his hands. In spite of the almost classical construction of the composition and the seemingly static nature of the subjects, there is action in this painting: Pagans is gently strumming and Degas’ father is listening. This becomes a characteristic aspect of Degas’ art. Like Manet and the Impressionists, he rejects subject and literary narrative, but in his own paintings there is always something happening. Also in 1869, Degas painted The Orchestra at the Opera.
At first glance this painting is also just a portrait of musicians. In fact it is a portrait of a whole group of the painter’s friends, whom his imagination has gathered together in the orchestra pit. The faces are painted in close up, they are individualised, they have character, and, above all, they are not posing, but, instead, are engrossed in the music. Before Edgar Degas, nothing like this had ever been done before. Three years later, in 1872, Degas’ first painting devoted solely to the ballet appeared: Le Foyer de la danse à l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier (The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Peletier). Degas moved from the theatre on to the rehearsal halls, where the dancers practised and took their lessons. This was how Degas arrived at the second sphere of that immediate, everyday life that was of interest to him. The ballet would remain his passion until the end of his days.