Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (colour)

myminifactory

The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years is a masterpiece by Edgar Degas that captures a 14-year-old Belgian student from the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, Marie van Goethem. Started around 1880, Degas created the sculpture in reddish-brown wax with the girl nude, then added clothing made of muslin and silk to achieve naturalism. The internal structure was built using pigmented beeswax, a metal armature rope, and paintbrushes covered by clay. When exhibited at Paris' Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, the sculpture shocked many. Joris-Karl Huysmans praised it as "the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know," while Paul Mantz described her as the "Flower of precocious depravity." After Degas' passing, his heirs decided to create a series of bronze casts from his original work.