Workers Wearing Toeshoes

Edgar Degas, The Dance Lesson, c. 1879
"In 1903, when ballet had been a prolific subject of Edgar Degas for over 30 years, an American collector, Louisine Havemeyer, asked him, 'Why, monsieur, do you always do ballet dancers?' His quick reply was, 'Because, madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks.' This already said much: in ballet he had found a modern source of classicism. Yet Degas’s body of work shows that he had found far more. His views of dance — in oil, sculpture, pastel, gouache, lithographs and other mediums — include those who aren’t dancing, those who can’t dance well yet, those who once danced but can do so no longer, and a great many of those who can but happen not to be doing so just now."
NYT: Workers Wearing Toeshoes, Royal Academy of Arts: Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement