Edgar Degas's The Dance Lesson, executed around 1879 in pastel and black chalk over three joined sheets of wove paper, belongs to the extended series of ballet studies that occupied him through the 1870s and 1880s. The pieced support, assembled from separate sheets rather than a single continuous surface, points to Degas's working method of expanding and reworking a composition over time rather than fixing it at the outset. The oblique, cropped viewpoint onto the rehearsal room, borrowed in part from photography and Japanese prints, was central to his reinvention of dance as a subject. The work came to the collection as a gift from Adaline Havemeyer Perkins in 1971, honoring her father Horace Havemeyer. Scion values such gifted works precisely because their path from studio to public collection is fully named and dated.