The girls are positioned on the left side of the painting and the boys on the right, while in the background stands a group of women and one man (identified as the mothers of the children and Lycurgus) watching them.

Behind the onlookers stands the city of Sparta, dominated by Mount Taygetus, from which the bodies of the society's unfit children were supposedly thrown into a ravine to die from trauma or exposure.

The painting was begun in 1860 with Degas returning to the canvas to rework the piece over the following years, though it remained unfinished upon the artist's death.

[3] Degas' revisitation of the faces of the young people is often mentioned in art criticism, as it is believed the artist changed the features of the youths from the classic handsome Greek ideal, to a more urban modernistic look.

The French art historian André Lemoisne, was first to note on this fact, remarking that the subjects had a contemporary Parisian look, more akin to the "gamins of Montmartre".