The Orchestra at the Opera

The view from the pit, painted for a player in it. Désiré Dihau, a bassoonist and composer, commissioned the picture, and Degas put him front and center at his bassoon. The cellist Louis-Marie Pilet is there too, and most of the fourteen musicians are portraits of the painter's friends. The ballet the audience paid for is reduced to legs and tutus cropped by the top edge, which is exactly how a ballet looks from the orchestra. Painted around 1870 and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, it is the definitive picture of what it is like to play for someone else's show.