In 1873 the great opera baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned from Degas a picture depicting ballerinas of the Opera ballet corps at an examination or dance class (Pantazzi 1988). (Faure became a major collector of Impressionist paintings and eventually the owner of the largest collection of Degas’s paintings in France.) The present work was delivered to Faure in November 1874 and Degas was paid five thousand francs for it. Faure lent it to the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876 under the title Examen de danse (Reff 1976; Clayson 1986).