Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
Edgar Degas (1834 to 1917) · 1875 to 1881, bronze cast between 1921 and 1931
A young girl stands in fourth position, feet turned out, hands clasped behind her back, chin lifted, eyes half closed. She wears a real fabric tutu and a satin ribbon in her hair, and she is neither pretty nor idealised. Degas modelled her on Marie van Goethem, a fourteen year old student at the Paris Opera ballet school whose family was poor and whose sisters also danced. The pupils of the ballet were known in Paris as the little rats, and they were often preyed upon by wealthy subscribers who had access backstage. Degas gives us the child herself, tired, defiant and absorbed in holding her pose.
The original figure, shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881, was made of tinted wax, dressed in a real bodice, tutu and slippers, with a wig of human hair. It was the only sculpture Degas ever exhibited, and it horrified many critics, who compared the girl's face to that of a criminal and complained that the figure belonged in a natural history museum. Look here at the surface, which keeps the marks of Degas's fingers in the wax, at the tension in the shoulder blades, and at the way the tutu of real tulle breaks the boundary between sculpture and life.
After Degas died in 1917 his heirs had the wax figure cast in bronze in an edition of about two dozen, each dressed with a fabric tutu and ribbon, and this is the cast that came to the French national collection in 1931. The wax original is in Washington. Marie van Goethem herself was dismissed from the Opera for missing classes not long after the sculpture was shown, and nothing certain is known of her later life. The figure that made her immortal is now one of the most reproduced sculptures in the world.
Did You Know? The first critics in 1881 argued about whether the wax figure was art at all, and one suggested it belonged in a glass case at the Musée Dupuytren of medical specimens.
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