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Lot Essay
No subject attracted Edgar Degas more profoundly than the world of the ballet. When Louisine Havemeyer, one of the artist’s most dedicated patrons, politely asked why he was so fascinated by these dancers, Degas replied: “Because madame, it is all that is left us of the combined movements of the Greeks” (J. DeVonyar and R. Kendall, Degas and the Dance, exh. cat., American Federation of Arts, New York, 2002, p. 234). Indeed, Degas’s vast corpus of dance imagery encompasses a seemingly limitless vocabulary of poses, representing a relentless exploration of the figure in motion. As Charles Baudelaire noted, the artist “loved the human body as a material harmony, as a beautiful architecture with the addition of movement” (quoted in J. Rewald, op. cit., 1990, p. 23). In many of his sculptures dedicated to the ballet, Degas diligently analyzed the inherent dynamism of the dancers from all angles, capturing their forms in the middle of a complex pose, as if frozen by the radical, experimental photography of Eadweard Muybridge.
Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée offers a candid depiction of one such ballet dancer, as she stretches between rehearsals, her arms pulled behind her to release the tension in her shoulders. The statue had originally been created by Degas as part his extensive preparations for Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, the largest, most technically ambitious, and iconographically complex of all of Degas’s sculptures, and the only one that he ever exhibited during his lifetime. With its unflinching physiognomic realism, bold and unconventional combination of materials, the Petite danseuse represented a daring and controversial break with academic tradition when the original wax model was shown publicly in 1881, at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. Capturing the lithe form of the dancer, the present Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée is an important step in understanding Degas’s process, revealing the layers of experimentation, revision and evolution that lay behind this bold project.
The model for the Petite danseuse was a young dancer named Marie van Goethem, as revealed in a small handwritten note Degas inscribed on a preparatory study for the sculpture. Born in early 1865 to Belgian immigrants (a tailor and a laundress), Marie was the middle of three sisters, all of whom were enrolled as ballet students at the Paris Opéra. The family resided on the lower slopes of Montmartre at 36 rue de Douai, just a few doors from Degas’s friend Ludovic Halévy and near several studios and apartments that the artist himself rented during this period. With her petite stature, long legs and arms, and elegant poise, Marie had the ideal proportions for a ballerina. Supposedly proud of her dark hair that she wore loose when she danced, she survived the unrelenting rigors and intense competition of her profession to perform in two Opéra ballets, La Korrigane in 1880, and Namouna in 1882. While Marie is believed to have posed for several other works by Degas around the same time as he was working on his grand sculptural project, including Danseuse au repos (Lemoisne, no. 573) and La leçon de danse (Lemoisne, no. 479), it is in the Petite danseuse and its associated works that she truly takes center stage in the artist’s work.
Degas completed an exhaustive series of preparatory drawings in charcoal, chalk and pastel for Petite danseuse, indicating the scope and ambition of the project. There exist five sheets containing a total of twelve full-length studies for the sculpture, as well as a page of sketches isolating Marie’s head and torso and one concentrating on her legs and feet. The various studies all show slightly different poses, body types, costumes, and hairstyles, suggesting that they derive from several separate modelling sessions, with a number focusing on the nude figure, as Degas analyzed the architecture of the body as it adopted certain stances. Moreover, the drawings depict Marie from multiple angles, creating a comprehensive account of her figure in the round, as if the artist was formulating his approach to modelling as he worked. Over the course of this research, Degas settled on the pose known as “casual fourth position,” exploring the stance exclusively across several images from the suite of drawings. That Degas chose a pose for his dancer that is neither a formal ballet position nor a wholly relaxed posture is not surprising—in his depictions of the ballet, he reveled in capturing such unselfconscious, unplanned movements, celebrating the quiet, often unseen moments that lay behind each stage performance.
In Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée Degas takes these investigations a step further, translating his vision in three-dimensional form for the first time. The original sculpture was modelled in wax, roughly three-quarters the size of the final Petite danseuse, and closely anticipates the pose, physical type, and overall effect of the clothed version. Eschewing academic tradition, Degas carefully reproduced the idiosyncrasies of Marie’s form, her long slender limbs, the slight convex curve of her stomach, emphasizing the awkward physiognomy of her fourteen-year-old body. There are a number of subtle differences between the nude study and the final version of the Petite danseuse—here, her weight appears cantilevered further back, her torso subtly shifting to create a more pronounced angle from her shoulders to her hips. Similarly, Degas adjusts the positioning of her right foot, placing it at a more diagonal angle, altering the engagement of the muscles in her legs and abdomen as she holds the position. With these small adjustments and alterations, the artist enhanced the expressiveness of her body, imbuing the sculpture with a rich internal tension and energy that powerfully invokes the physicality of the young ballet dancer.
While the original wax model of Degas’s sculpture was executed circa 1878-1881, the present bronze version was cast after 1919 by the founder Hébrard as part of an agreement with the artist’s heirs to preserve a group of his sculptures in bronze. This arrangement specified that Hébrard would create a limited edition of several pieces, each numbered A to T, plus two casts reserved for the Degas heirs and the founder respectively. However, the lettering on the bronzes was not consistent across the final editions, possibly due to the fact that Hébrard needed to pre-sell many of the proposed twenty examples prior to the bronzes being created, in order to offset the extensive costs associated with undertaking the process. As a result, there are several discrepancies between the casts allocated to buyers and the final sculpture they received—for instance, two of the bronzes for Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée were issued with the letter K, while the present cast, purchased by Dr. Albert Charpentier directly from the Hébrard foundry in 1928, was inadvertently issued without its letter.
Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée offers a candid depiction of one such ballet dancer, as she stretches between rehearsals, her arms pulled behind her to release the tension in her shoulders. The statue had originally been created by Degas as part his extensive preparations for Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, the largest, most technically ambitious, and iconographically complex of all of Degas’s sculptures, and the only one that he ever exhibited during his lifetime. With its unflinching physiognomic realism, bold and unconventional combination of materials, the Petite danseuse represented a daring and controversial break with academic tradition when the original wax model was shown publicly in 1881, at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. Capturing the lithe form of the dancer, the present Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée is an important step in understanding Degas’s process, revealing the layers of experimentation, revision and evolution that lay behind this bold project.
The model for the Petite danseuse was a young dancer named Marie van Goethem, as revealed in a small handwritten note Degas inscribed on a preparatory study for the sculpture. Born in early 1865 to Belgian immigrants (a tailor and a laundress), Marie was the middle of three sisters, all of whom were enrolled as ballet students at the Paris Opéra. The family resided on the lower slopes of Montmartre at 36 rue de Douai, just a few doors from Degas’s friend Ludovic Halévy and near several studios and apartments that the artist himself rented during this period. With her petite stature, long legs and arms, and elegant poise, Marie had the ideal proportions for a ballerina. Supposedly proud of her dark hair that she wore loose when she danced, she survived the unrelenting rigors and intense competition of her profession to perform in two Opéra ballets, La Korrigane in 1880, and Namouna in 1882. While Marie is believed to have posed for several other works by Degas around the same time as he was working on his grand sculptural project, including Danseuse au repos (Lemoisne, no. 573) and La leçon de danse (Lemoisne, no. 479), it is in the Petite danseuse and its associated works that she truly takes center stage in the artist’s work.
Degas completed an exhaustive series of preparatory drawings in charcoal, chalk and pastel for Petite danseuse, indicating the scope and ambition of the project. There exist five sheets containing a total of twelve full-length studies for the sculpture, as well as a page of sketches isolating Marie’s head and torso and one concentrating on her legs and feet. The various studies all show slightly different poses, body types, costumes, and hairstyles, suggesting that they derive from several separate modelling sessions, with a number focusing on the nude figure, as Degas analyzed the architecture of the body as it adopted certain stances. Moreover, the drawings depict Marie from multiple angles, creating a comprehensive account of her figure in the round, as if the artist was formulating his approach to modelling as he worked. Over the course of this research, Degas settled on the pose known as “casual fourth position,” exploring the stance exclusively across several images from the suite of drawings. That Degas chose a pose for his dancer that is neither a formal ballet position nor a wholly relaxed posture is not surprising—in his depictions of the ballet, he reveled in capturing such unselfconscious, unplanned movements, celebrating the quiet, often unseen moments that lay behind each stage performance.
In Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée Degas takes these investigations a step further, translating his vision in three-dimensional form for the first time. The original sculpture was modelled in wax, roughly three-quarters the size of the final Petite danseuse, and closely anticipates the pose, physical type, and overall effect of the clothed version. Eschewing academic tradition, Degas carefully reproduced the idiosyncrasies of Marie’s form, her long slender limbs, the slight convex curve of her stomach, emphasizing the awkward physiognomy of her fourteen-year-old body. There are a number of subtle differences between the nude study and the final version of the Petite danseuse—here, her weight appears cantilevered further back, her torso subtly shifting to create a more pronounced angle from her shoulders to her hips. Similarly, Degas adjusts the positioning of her right foot, placing it at a more diagonal angle, altering the engagement of the muscles in her legs and abdomen as she holds the position. With these small adjustments and alterations, the artist enhanced the expressiveness of her body, imbuing the sculpture with a rich internal tension and energy that powerfully invokes the physicality of the young ballet dancer.
While the original wax model of Degas’s sculpture was executed circa 1878-1881, the present bronze version was cast after 1919 by the founder Hébrard as part of an agreement with the artist’s heirs to preserve a group of his sculptures in bronze. This arrangement specified that Hébrard would create a limited edition of several pieces, each numbered A to T, plus two casts reserved for the Degas heirs and the founder respectively. However, the lettering on the bronzes was not consistent across the final editions, possibly due to the fact that Hébrard needed to pre-sell many of the proposed twenty examples prior to the bronzes being created, in order to offset the extensive costs associated with undertaking the process. As a result, there are several discrepancies between the casts allocated to buyers and the final sculpture they received—for instance, two of the bronzes for Etude de nu pour la danseuse habillée were issued with the letter K, while the present cast, purchased by Dr. Albert Charpentier directly from the Hébrard foundry in 1928, was inadvertently issued without its letter.