Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) · 1878 to 1881
A young ballet student stands with her feet turned out in fourth position, hands clasped behind her back, chin lifted, eyes half closed. She wears a real cotton bodice, a gauze tutu and cloth slippers, and a satin ribbon ties back a wig of real hair. Her pose is patient and slightly defiant, the pose of a girl who has been told to hold still. The model was Marie van Goethem, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the Paris Opera ballet school, one of the working-class girls who trained for years for a chance at the stage.
What you are looking at is the original: not a bronze but the wax figure Degas built with his own hands, modelled over a metal armature packed with rope, clay and even old paintbrushes, which conservators found inside. He tinted the wax to look like skin and dressed the figure in real clothes, then set it in a glass case like a specimen. Look at the face: Degas pushed the forehead back and the jaw forward, and the critics of 1881 called her ugly, a little monkey, a flower of the gutter. Look also at the strain in her shoulders and the tension in her clasped fingers, which make her seem like a living person rather than an idealised statue.
Degas showed the wax at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881, the only sculpture he ever exhibited, and the scandal was so great that he never showed another. After his death in 1917 his heirs had bronze casts made, which now stand in museums around the world. The wax original stayed with the Mellon family and came to the National Gallery in 1999 from Paul Mellon. Notice the tutu: it was replaced over the years, and the current one is a reconstruction based on the earliest descriptions, longer than the short tutus on most of the bronzes.
Did You Know? The bronzes seen in other museums are all posthumous casts; this wax figure is the only version Degas made and exhibited himself.
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