In his ballet subjects of the 1870s, Degas often built the composition around the orchestra pit, placing a musician's shoulders, instrument or profile close to the picture plane while dancers appear smaller and more distant, framed by the gap between musicians rather than presented as the picture's sole subject. Faces in these orchestra scenes are painted with individual character, engrossed in the music rather than posing for the artist, a treatment that departed sharply from the conventions of formal group portraiture^[1]. The device let Degas fold two separate worlds, the working musician and the performing dancer, into a single frame without resolving them into a single narrative moment.

The cropping and unequal scale in these compositions, where a foreground figure can loom disproportionately large against a small, distant dancer, produces an effect close to what a photograph gives when its foreground is greatly enlarged, and contemporaries noted the resemblance directly^[1]. Degas achieved this well before photography itself could easily capture such effects indoors under gaslight, so the connection is best understood as parallel invention rather than direct technical borrowing^[1].

Across Degas's ballet pictures of the 1870s and after, the balance of attention shifts. Where his earliest orchestra-pit compositions gave real weight and individual character to the musicians themselves, later works increasingly let the dancer, caught in movement, become the picture's true subject, with musicians reduced to a supporting presence at the frame's edge. Degas worked from memory and repeated studio poses as much as from direct observation of any single performance, a method he described to contemporaries as drawing only what remains in one's memory rather than copying what is seen, treating recollection as an active part of composing the final image rather than a shortcut around it.