La danse (also known as Bacchante) is an oil painting created circa 1906 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956).

Bacchante is a pre-Cubist or Proto-Cubist work executed in a highly personal Divisionist style during the height of the Fauve period.

[1] The painting was purchased by the art historian and collector Wilhelm Uhde and formed part of his collection until it was sequestered by the French government just before World War I.

The subject matter is classical—reminiscent of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (an artist Metzinger greatly admired)—yet its treatment is everything but classical.

Metzinger's early quest for a 'total image' explains the lack of illusory depth, the profuse light, and the refusal to depict a marked difference between the foreground, background and the woman's frame.

Metzinger added a conspicuously tropical setting presumably under the influence of Paul Gauguin's Mahana no atua, Day of the Gods (1894) or Henri (lLe Douanier) Rousseau's Le Rêve (two more painters the artist greatly admired).

At this time he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and shortly after at the gallery of Berthe Weill, with Raoul Dufy (1903-1904), with Robert Delaunay (early 1907), with Marie Laurencin (1908) and later with André Derain, Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen (1910).

[7] In 1908 Metzinger participated in a group exhibition at Wilhelm Uhde's gallery on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs with Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Herbin, Jules Pascin and Pablo Picasso.

It wasn't until the autumn of 1907 at L’Estaque that Braque began his transition away from bright hues to more subdued colors, possibly as a result of the memorial exhibition of Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne of 1907.

I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature."

[7][12] "Artists of the years 1910-1914, including Mondrian and Kandinsky as well as the Cubists", writes Robert Herbert, "took support from one of its central principles: that line and color have the ability to communicate certain emotions to the observer, independently of natural form."

[15] The triangular composition is closely related to Cézanne's Bathers; a series that would soon become a source of inspiration for Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Critics were horrified by the flatness, bright colors, eclectic style and mixed technique of Le Bonheur de Vivre.

Both Robert Delaunay and Jean Metzinger between 1905 and 1907 painted in a Divisionist style with large squares or rectangular planes of color (see also Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape).

Chassevent writes: The following year, Metzinger and Delaunay, with whom he shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill's gallery in 1907, were singled out by Louis Vauxcelles as Divisionists who used large, mosaic-like 'cubes' to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.