This piece pulls you right into a corner of the Theatre Carré in Amsterdam, where the usual swirl of rehearsals has come to a complete stop. A group of young ballerinas fills the space in their white tutus. What’s unfolding is a real moment of them taking a stand together. One dancer steps forward just enough to lead the conversation with her hands on her hips. Their expressions carry the resolve that comes after too many long nights and too little recognition for all the work they pour into every performance. You can almost sense the shared understanding passing between them, the way they’ve stopped everything to speak up.

Across from them is a mustached man in his suit, possibly the director or manager of the Dutch Opera compan. A couple of other men sit near him, watching the exchange unfold. Van der Waay painted this with his characteristic combination of careful observation and looser brushwork that he developed around that time, influenced by the way Isaac Israëls captured everyday Amsterdam life. He shows the ballerinas as real people claiming their space offstage, inspired by the actual struggles performers faced in those years with the opera and ballet companies.

Van der Waay was deep in the official art world of the Netherlands, spending thirty years as a professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam where he trained students like Piet Mondrian, and he even landed big decorative commissions like the allegorical panels he created for the sides of the Golden Coach that the people of Amsterdam gave to Queen Wilhelmina back in 1898. Those panels are full of grand national symbols and scenes meant to celebrate the country in all its glory.

Yet here he is in this painting, zeroing in on a moment pulled straight from the real struggles inside the Dutch Opera company at the Theatre Carré. The ballerinas there faced those crushing schedules and wages that never quite stretched far enough. He had already built a name for himself with an entire series of paintings that followed the daily routines of the Amsterdam Orphanage girls in their red and black uniforms. It is the same careful eye for the strength in young women who lived under strict rules and long days, only now applied to the dancers who kept the performances alive night after night.

Around the time he made this work his brushwork had loosened up after soaking in the influence of painters like Isaac Israëls, bringing in that academic training with a more immediate feel that lets you sense the conversation happening right there in the antechamber. He even slipped into the 1928 Olympic art competitions later on, but it is this backstage gathering that stays with you because it lets the everyday push for better conditions take center stage instead of any spotlight moment on the boards. You see why people still talk about how Waay had a gift for spotting the human core in places where most folks only saw the glamour or the uniform.

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NICOLAAS VAN DER WAAY - STRIKE OF THE BALLERINAS, 1900