#thelittledancer

The Little Dancer in National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. taken July 2018

The Little Dancer in National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. taken July 2018

The Little Dancer in National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. taken 2009

The original statue by Edvard Degas ( 1834-1917) is at the The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It’s known and loved by many because after the death of the artist it was cast in bronze and placed in many different museums. The link to the museum explains in more detail.

When Degas displayed it at an exhibition in 1881, this realistic statue brought mixed feelings. The public was not accustomed to contemporary subjects like this little ordinary dancer. Many critics found her ugly. Quote from the Tripsavy blog on the model:

The model was Marie Genevieve von Goethem, a Belgian student who had joined the Paris Opera’s ballet company as a means of getting out of poverty. Her mother worked in a laundry and her older sister was a prostitute. (Marie’s younger sister also trained with the ballet.) She first posed for Degas when she was just 11, then again when she was 14, both in the nude and in her ballet clothes. Degas built the sculpture out of coloured beeswax and modelling clay. Marie is depicted as she likely was; a girl from the poorer classes training to be a ballerina. She stands in the fourth position but is not especially poised. It’s as though Degas captures her in a moment during a routine practice rather than performing on stage. The tights on her legs are lumpy and pilled and her face pushes forward in space with an almost haughty expression that shows us how she is trying to hold her place among the dancers. She is brimming with forced confidence and gritty determination.

  Degas was obsessed with the movements of the dancer and made many sketches of her from all angles as a foundation for his modelling of the statue in Washington, D.C. in original wax, Yellow wax, hair, ribbon, linen bodice, satin shoes, muslin tutu, 98.9 x34.7 x35.2 cm. Here is a short YouTube video on her ballet movements.

Three studies of Marie in the fourth position

Little girl practicing in the barre 1880

Sketches showed in a catalogue I bought from a special exhibition on “Degas and the ballet, picturing movement” at the Royal Academy of Art in 2011.

I have seen it in Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, in Tate Modern in London, in Museé d’Orsay in Paris, in New York Metropolitan Museum, in The Museum of Fine Art Boston, Philadelphia Art Museum and the original in Washington, D.C.

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When I see her, I think about the hard life she might have had and how it would have been to pose for the artist at that tender age. In many of my pictures, it seems that nobody stops to see her and she makes us believe she doesn’t care.  She seems very much alive even now 137 years later. The more I see the statue, the more I like it or her.