Author
Sculpture and Form
Little Dancer of Fourteen Years
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer is a sculpture begun c. 1880 by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a Belgian named Marie van Goethem.
Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)
The work matters because it condenses bodily presence, silhouette, and form working in real space and makes that artistic language legible even outside the museum context.
Highlights
Surprising facts & legends
Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.
Interesting facts
The story around the work
Interesting facts & legends
- The model was Marie van Goethem, a Paris Opera ballet student and the daughter of a laundress and a tailor; she was later dismissed from the school for missing classes.
- 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.
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 Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work
Historical context
Little Dancer of Fourteen Years inside its era
The connection between Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, Edgar Degas, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. makes the work a strong point of entry into sculpture and form.
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer is a sculpture begun c. 1880 by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a Belgian named Marie van Goethem. The location in National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.
Path to recognition
How the work became widely known
Little Dancer of Fourteen Years remains widely known because it helps explain not only the artist, but the visual order of sculpture and form itself.
Value
Why the work matters now
The work matters because it condenses bodily presence, silhouette, and form working in real space and makes that artistic language legible even outside the museum context.
Connections and legacy
How to read the work more broadly
The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, with her real tutu and ribbon, exploded ideas of what sculpture could be and anticipated the mixed-media art of the 20th century.
Official sources
Where to verify the institutional context
- Official institution site National Gallery of Art
- Official collection / archive National Gallery of Art
Visual context
Related images and nearby entry points
Edgar Degas
What to look at
Three entry points into the work
Even a very famous artwork opens more fully when the viewer knows where to look for tension, meaning, and compositional focus.
- Read the work as volume: the silhouette changes with every point of view.
- Notice how material and surface treatment intensify gesture and character.
- Read the work not only as an isolated image, but as part of the history of sculpture and form.
More by the artist
More works: Edgar Degas
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Continue the exhibition
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This makes it easier to move through art not as a list of names, but as a connected system of images, themes, and historical gestures.
