The artwork Ballet Rehearsal develops the theme of creative endeavors being understood as an act of hard work. Degas said many times that beautiful art is cruel and callous, just like life itself. The ballerinas may not master the dance from endless repetition of these monotonous memorized motions, but the dance will not happen without them. 

Degas preferred to draw such compositions not from a model, but from memory, and his fantastic mind recorded with unusual accuracy both the general character of an event and each detail, each movement or pose.