"The Dance Class" by Degas, one of his grand oils in Washington, is not where you'd expect it. It doesn't hang with the French pictures at the National Gallery. Nor is it at the Phillips Collection.

Degas’ masterpiece The Dance Class shatters the traditional impression of ballet dancers and exposes the truth behind the curtains of the 19th-century Parisian stage. It gives an insight into the ...

“No art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” Edgar Degas once boasted. An inkling of the French artist’s legendary perfectionism can be found in an 1876 letter he wrote to his London dealer ...