Sculpture and Form

Little Dancer of Fourteen Years

Degas dressed a wax figure — not bronze — in a real fabric tutu and ribbon, which is what made it so shocking. The bronze casts (also with fabric tutus) were made after his death.

Edgar Degas · 1881

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Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Degas dressed the figure in a tutu of real fabric and tied her hair with a real ribbon — using everyday materials in sculpture was almost unthinkable at the time.

Highlights

Facts & legends

Degas dressed a wax figure — not bronze — in a real fabric tutu and ribbon, which is what made it so shocking. The bronze casts (also with fabric tutus) were made after his death.
Degas dressed the figure in a tutu of real fabric and tied her hair with a real ribbon — using everyday materials in sculpture was almost unthinkable at the time.
Only the wax original was shown in Degas's lifetime, and visitors to the 1881 Impressionist exhibition recoiled from what they called the girl's ugliness and vulgarity.
Every known bronze cast of the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years was made after the artist's death; Degas himself never allowed the sculpture to be translated into metal.
Nineteenth-century critics wrote in earnest that the girl's face bore the stamp of vice — an age that believed criminality could be read off a person's features.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

Estimated value

What it is worth today

Bronze casts of the Little Dancer are held in museums; at auction they have reached around $25 million, but this one is a museum piece and not for sale.

More details Who Degas's fourteen-year-old model was, why wax and real hair disturbed viewers, and what X-rays found inside the famous figure.

Not a ballerina on stage

Degas showed fatigue after rehearsal

The girl stands in fourth position, but this is no performance. Hips and stomach project, hands clasp behind her, chin rises and eyes nearly close. Dancers recognise the fatigue after a long class, when the body retains discipline but stops pretending to be weightless. Degas chose neither leap nor bow but a pause that makes ballet's labour visible.

The model was Marie Geneviève van Goethem, a student at the Paris Opera ballet school, about fourteen and from a poor family. The Opera offered such girls a profession without promising safety. Degas drew Marie, made smaller studies and built the figure gradually. The title preserves her age, turning an apparent anonymous type into a portrait at the vulnerable boundary between childhood and adult work.

A sculpture dressed like a person

Wax, cloth and hair broke museum rules

The figure combines pigmented beeswax, clay, metal, rope and improvised supports. She wears a real cloth bodice, tutu and slippers, with silk and linen ribbon; human hair forms the wig. Some clothing is coated in wax, so the border between modelled body and real object keeps shifting. Degas was not decorating a conventional statue but assembling presence from different degrees of reality.

Wax carried uncomfortable associations in 1881. It belonged to anatomical displays, ethnographic museums and popular entertainment, not noble sculpture. Real hair made the figure seem at once alive and exhibited as a specimen. Mixed materials now look prophetic of twentieth-century art. Then they broke the reassuring separation between artwork, mannequin and person.

The only sculpture shown in his lifetime

The Impressionist exhibition became a trial

Degas presented Little Dancer at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in spring 1881. It was the only sculpture he ever exhibited publicly. A glass case intensified its resemblance to a scientific specimen. Responses split. Some recognised startling truth; others attacked the girl's features as ugly, reading them through discredited theories that claimed faces revealed innate character.

The cruelty of that criticism also exposes the model's social position. Audiences enjoyed ballet's light and costume while ignoring poverty, selection and physical exhaustion. Degas was not necessarily acting as Marie's advocate; his gaze could be detached. Yet the work removed the usual distance. The girl neither entertains nor requests pity. She endures inspection while keeping her thoughts closed.

Paintbrushes inside the arms

X-rays revealed Degas's improvised engineering

Stillness hides a complicated structure. A lead armature wrapped in rope and wire supports clay beneath wax. National Gallery X-rays found old paintbrushes reinforcing the arms. Inside the head lies a smaller earlier version: Degas built over it, changed the angle and increased the height. This was not a perfect foundry calculation but a working system altered with the pose.

The structure explains the original's fragility. Wax reacts to temperature, cloth ages and mixed supports carry the weight. The costume has its own history of replacement and conservation; it cannot look exactly as it did in 1881. Conservators preserve a changing object, where making the tutu look “new” could erase biography. Material instability continues the subject of a vulnerable body.

Why there are so many bronzes

The familiar versions appeared after Degas's death

After Degas died in 1917, more than a hundred wax and clay sculptures were found in his studio, many damaged. His heirs authorised founder Adrien Hébrard to translate surviving models into bronze. Those posthumous casts entered museums and made the dancer famous. Their cloth skirts and ribbons remain, but bronze loses wax's translucency and uneasy resemblance to skin.

The unique wax original is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, alongside a plaster and a major group of Degas sculptures. A Little Dancer elsewhere is not necessarily fake, but its label should say posthumous bronze cast. Walk around her. From the front the lifted chin can seem defiant; from the side fatigue and sway appear; from behind the clasped hands turn discipline into something close to physical restraint.

Official sources