Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

A two-thirds life-size figure of a fourteen-year-old ballet student, modelled in pigmented beeswax over a lead armature packed with rope, wood and old paintbrushes, and dressed in a real cotton bodice, a real tulle tutu, real linen slippers and a wig of human hair. Degas showed it in a glass case at the sixth impressionist exhibition in 1881. It was the only sculpture he exhibited in his lifetime, and the critics called it ugly.

It is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, acquired by Paul Mellon in 1956 and bequeathed in 1999. It has never been sold at auction. Everything sold at auction under this title is a posthumous bronze, cast from plaster after Degas died in 1917 by the Hebrard foundry in Paris, in an edition lettered A to T with two further casts marked HER and HER.D. Those bronzes have made 13.3 million pounds, 15.8 million pounds, 41.6 million dollars and 25 million pounds.

A second family of Little Dancer bronzes exists, cast from the 1990s onward at the Valsuani foundry from a plaster whose history before 1955 nobody can document, and which differs from the Washington wax in body, pose, face and hair. Most Degas specialists reject them. Seventy-four of them were given to Purdue University in 2023. This record is built around that distinction, because at this level of the market a cast letter and a foundry stamp are the difference between eight figures and five.

Almost every picture you have seen of this object is of something else

There is one Little Dancer Aged Fourteen made by Edgar Degas. It is in wax, it is in Washington, and it has never been for sale. There are roughly two dozen bronzes that look like it, cast after his death, and they are the ones that travel, that appear in museums from New York to Paris to Copenhagen, and that come up at auction. They are not the same object, and this record will keep saying so.

The wax stands 98.9 centimetres without its base and weighs 49 pounds. It is two-thirds life size. The National Gallery of Art lists its medium as pigmented beeswax, clay, metal armature, rope, paintbrushes, human hair, silk and linen ribbon, cotton faille bodice, cotton and silk tutu, and linen slippers, on a wooden base. That list is not a curator being exhaustive for its own sake. Every item on it was an argument in 1881, and several of them are still arguments now.

The distinction matters commercially as well as intellectually. The bronzes are the market. The wax is the source. A collector holding a bronze holds a posthumous object made by a foundry from a plaster, authorised by a contract signed seven months after the artist was dead. That is not a criticism of the bronzes, which are accepted by every major museum and every major auction house. It is a description of what they are.

The girl was real and the record of her runs out

The model was Marie Genevieve van Goethem, born 7 June 1865 in the ninth arrondissement of Paris to a laundress and a tailor who had come from Belgium in the early 1860s. She entered the dance school of the Paris Opera in 1878 with her younger sister, and passed into the corps de ballet in 1880, debuting in La Korrigane. In 1882, the year after the sculpture was shown, she was dismissed for missing too many classes.

Her elder sister Antoinette was jailed for theft. Her younger sister, who took the name Charlotte, stayed at the Opera into the twentieth century and became a teacher there. Marie herself leaves the documentary record at that point. A death date of 7 December 1935 now circulates, but it sits in the same reference work that states no trace of her later life or death has been found, and this record treats it as unverified rather than established.

She was fourteen when Degas began, and about fifteen or sixteen by the time the wax was shown. The title fixes her at fourteen. It is the only title Degas gave the piece, and the posthumous names by which it was known for decades, Dressed Dancer and Big Dressed Dancer, were invented after his death and first appear handwritten in the 1921 Hebrard exhibition catalogue.

Built from the inside out

Radiography and materials analysis at the National Gallery have turned this figure into one of the best documented objects of nineteenth-century sculpture, and what they found is strange. The central armature is lead, confirmed by X-ray fluorescence: hollow pipes about half an inch across, one vertical, meeting an inverted U at the groin whose two legs run down into the dancer's legs and are screwed into a metal plate in the base. Around that, Degas built a core of wood pieces bound with twisted wire, a second layer of organic bulk bound with rope, and then a water-based air-dried clay, and only then the wax.

The arms are the weak point and always have been. Instead of tying pipes to the central framework, Degas ran a pair of loosely twisted iron wires that stop short at the left bicep and are not connected to the central pipe. He then reinforced each arm internally with a paintbrush running its length, visible in the radiograph by its tapered handle and metal ferrule. The conservators note plainly that these wires define a placement but do not provide true support.

The wax itself is molten beeswax laid on in campaigns, from less than half a centimetre at the ankles to about four centimetres at the shoulders, extended with potato starch and pigmented with iron oxides, charcoal black, brown earth, calcium carbonate, quartz, lead white and chrome yellows and oranges. He tooled creases into the stockings, outlined fingernails on the fourth and fifth digits of both hands where nobody would look, and painted the lips pink. Inside her head, the radiograph shows a smaller earlier head: he remodelled it to change the angle and raise her height.

The clothes are real and were altered to fit. The bodice is a manufactured cotton faille garment whose shoulder straps he cut so it would go over the arms, then rebuttoned and coated in unpigmented wax; its buttons are zinc casings covered in fabric. The slippers are real linen ballet slippers, 15.5 centimetres long, probably a child's, with the toes cut and squared and long cotton ribbons added at the back. The tutu is five layers of alternating silk and cotton, net and plain weave. The wig is dark blond human hair, its braid inserted into a hollow at the back of the head and held by wax squeezed around it at the nape.

Paris did not like her

Degas provided a vitrine. He had done so once before, in 1880, when the case was set up at the impressionist exhibition and the sculpture never arrived. In 1881 the case was installed at the opening and the figure appeared two weeks later. Critics made a great deal of this. Some treated the empty case as the work's stand-in; once she was inside it, opponents called it a glass cage that safely quarantined a dangerous child-beast or a medical specimen.

The reviews were, with a few exceptions, hostile, and the hostility was aimed at the girl rather than the modelling. Paul Mantz in Le Temps called her a flower of precocious depravity and read in her face the hateful promise of every vice. Others compared her to a monkey. Charles Ephrussi complained that the work was unfinished, that the colour of the wax was badly blended and spoiled by dirty blotches. The choice of wax was itself an offence: wax was for anatomical museums, waxworks and fairground entertainment, not for art.

Joris-Karl Huysmans went the other way and got it right. He called it the first truly modern attempt at sculpture he knew, and observed that the terrible realism of the statuette made the public distinctly uneasy. He was wrong about one detail, describing the hair as horse hair; analysis has since identified it as human Caucasian hair. He was correct about everything that mattered.

Degas never exhibited a sculpture again. He kept working in wax and clay for the rest of his life, in private, for about another thirty years.

What he left, and what the foundry made of it

Degas died on 27 September 1917. The dealers Joseph Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard inventoried his possessions and found approximately 150 sculptures scattered through the apartment and studio, most of them fragmentary. An inventory was made of eighty. Ultimately seventy-four figures were translated into bronze, although sources differ and some accounts say seventy-three.

The condition was bad. The art historian Paul Lafond recorded that at the time of Degas's death the Little Dancer's arms were broken off from the body and lying at its feet. The Gallery's conservators cannot corroborate that literally, but they confirm a prominent crack in the upper left arm visible in the 1917-1918 inventory photographs and still visible in photographs taken in 1955 or early 1956, since repaired, and recent radiographs show deep cracks at the ankles and knees of the inner clay core.

On 13 May 1918 the heirs signed a contract with the Hebrard foundry authorising reproduction in bronze. The heirs were Degas's brother Rene and four surviving children of his sister Marguerite. The contract stipulated two complete sets, one for the heirs and one for the foundry, and authorised a limit of twenty casts of each figure for sale. It also provided that the original figures became the property of the foundry, which is why the wax that is the subject of this record spent the next thirty-seven years in the hands of the Hebrard family rather than a museum. Casting began in late 1919 and ran, on the National Gallery's account, to 1932.

Everyone assumed the waxes had been destroyed in the moulding. In 1955 Nelly Hebrard, the founder's daughter, announced that most of them had survived. They were consigned to M. Knoedler and Company in New York, and on 25 May 1956 Paul Mellon bought them. He gave and bequeathed them to the National Gallery of Art. That is how the only sculpture Degas ever exhibited came to Washington.

The edition question is the whole question

For a Degas sculpture, the object in front of you tells you almost nothing. Two bronzes of this figure can be visually indistinguishable and separated in value by a factor of a hundred. What separates them is a letter, a stamp, and a chain of paper.

The Hebrard editions ran to twenty-two casts of each figure: twenty lettered A through T, plus one marked HER for the heirs and one marked HER.D for the foundry. The letters and the sculpture numbers were stamped or incised into each bronze after casting. The A.A. Hebrard stamp sits in a rectangular box below the words cire perdue, and Degas's signature was not signed but applied by the foundry with a stamp impressed into the wax. Edition A, the first and finest set, went to the American collector Louisine Havemeyer, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929; the Met's Little Dancer, object number 29.100.370, is dated by the museum modelled 1881, cast 1922, with a modern tutu.

For every figure except this one, the bronzes were cast not from Degas's wax but from a bronze master marked MODELE, made by the foundryman Albino Palazzolo directly from the original. That makes the serial bronzes surmoulages, casts taken from casts, which the art trade normally refuses. The Degas bronzes are among the few accepted exceptions. Because bronze shrinks about two per cent on cooling, each generation is smaller: a serial cast is roughly four per cent smaller than the wax.

The Little Dancer was the exception to the exception. Its size and mixed media made it awkward, and Palazzolo and Hebrard held it back, then took a flexible gelatin mould from the wax with the skirt and hair ribbon removed and made plasters instead of a bronze master, because plaster does not shrink. Palazzolo said in 1960 that he made two plasters himself because the wax was too fragile to stand repeated moulding. One is now in the National Gallery, the other in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.

The consequences of this are still being worked out. In 1976 a complete set of bronze MODELES was found in Hebrard's basement storeroom and bought in 1977 by Norton Simon from the Lefevre Gallery. It included a Little Dancer marked MODELE. Arthur Beale measured it and found it about two per cent smaller than the serial casts rather than larger, which is to say roughly four per cent smaller than a true master should be. It is not the model for the edition. It is a surmoulage carrying a master's inscription. Beale's conclusion, on mould lines, armature radiography and about ten averaged measurements, is that the Joslyn plaster is the lost modele, the mother of every Hebrard bronze Little Dancer in the world.

So: a bronze Little Dancer with a Hebrard stamp and a letter is a third-generation object descended from a plaster, made between 1922 and the 1930s, and it is the thing the market buys. A bronze marked MODELE may be a generation further away than its inscription implies. And a plaster in Omaha, given to a regional museum by a dealer in 1971, may be the most important surviving intermediary of them all.

The contested casts

In 1981 Leonardo Benatov bought the Valsuani foundry and found a cache of about seventy-five plaster replicas of Degas sculptures with no documented history before 1955. In 1997 and 1998 he began casting bronzes from his plaster Little Dancer and selling them as high-quality copies at about sixty thousand dollars each. In 2004 the dealer Walter Maibaum bought the rest of the plasters and the exclusive right to cast and sell complete sets; the art historian Gregory Hedberg bought the Little Dancer plaster for Hirschl and Adler and sold it to a Los Angeles collector for four hundred thousand dollars.

The claim made for these casts is that the plasters were taken from Degas's waxes during his lifetime, probably by his friend the sculptor Albert Bartholome, and therefore stand closer to the artist than the Hebrard bronzes do. Maibaum's technical argument is coherent on its own terms: the plasters are larger than the Hebrard bronzes and larger than the MODELES, which is what you would expect if they came from the waxes rather than from a bronze, since plaster does not shrink. Carbon dating of plant fibres in the plaster mix placed them before the atomic era, and a petrographic laboratory matched their composition to a pre-1920 Rodin plaster. The Succession Degas approved the casting in 2007 and, on Maibaum's account, the Comite Degas has authenticated both plasters and bronzes.

The counter-case is that none of this establishes what it needs to establish. The plasters have no provenance at all before 1955. Therese Burollet, who has studied Bartholome for more than fifty years, told ARTnews that nothing in the letters, archives, press or family tradition suggests Bartholome ever cast a single Degas work in plaster during the artist's life. The Valsuani Little Dancer differs from the Washington wax in body type, pose, face and hair; Hedberg's explanation is that Degas radically revised his own sculpture after 1903 into what Hedberg calls the inferior version now in Washington, and the National Gallery's scientific examination of the wax does not support that conversion. When the Hermitage convened a colloquium on posthumous bronzes in 2012, the leading Degas scholars declined to attend, some citing fear of legal action; Richard Kendall observed that the new bronzes had failed to persuade either the specialists or the major auction houses.

In early 2023 the Chicago businessman Avrum Gray gave seventy-four Valsuani bronzes, including a Little Dancer, to Purdue University. The appraisal was made by the late Alex Rosenberg, who had organised exhibitions of Valsuani bronzes in Tel Aviv and Havana, and valued the gift at just over twenty-one million dollars with a market value of as much as fifty-three million. Patricia Failing, who has reported on Degas sculpture since 1979, pointed out that the market value figure was derived from what Hebrard casts fetch on the open market, not from private sales of Valsuani casts. That is the entire dispute in one sentence: the Valsuani bronzes are priced against a market they have not been admitted to.

What the casts are worth, and what the wax is worth

The bronzes have been among the most expensive sculptures of the nineteenth century for twenty-five years, and one cast in particular has been sold three times in public and can be tracked as an index.

The cast marked HER, 101.3 centimetres high with a Hebrard stamp, sold at Sotheby's in London in 2000, again on 24 June 2015 for about 15.8 million pounds, and again on 24 June 2026 as lot 5 of Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, the collection of the late Joe Lewis, where it made 25 million pounds against an estimate of 18 to 25 million. Reporting of that sale does not separate hammer from premium and quotes both 25 and 25.1 million pounds. A different cast, 105 centimetres including base and traced back to the Marie Harriman Gallery, the Harrimans and Pamela Churchill Harriman, sold at Sotheby's on 3 February 2004 and again on 3 February 2009, where it hammered at 11.8 million pounds and made 13,257,250 pounds with fees against an estimate of 9 to 12 million.

The record belongs to a third cast, commissioned from Hebrard in August 1927, sold from the collection of Anne H. Bass at Christie's in New York on 12 May 2022. It hammered at 36 million dollars and made 41,610,000 with premium against an estimate of 20 to 30 million, an auction record for Degas in any medium. Press accounts of this sale routinely give one figure without saying which it is, and at least one account reports 41.6 million as the hammer.

None of these figures belong to the object in this record. The wax has never been offered at auction. Its only private transaction was its sale by the Hebrard family through Knoedler to Paul Mellon on 25 May 1956, as one of a group of about sixty-eight surviving originals, at a price that has not been published in the sources consulted. It went to the National Gallery of Art as a bequest, without money changing hands.

That is the shape of the thing. The object Degas made and showed once, and which the critics of 1881 called ugly, is a gift on a public floor in Washington. The objects made from it by other hands after he was dead trade for tens of millions. And the objects made from plasters that nobody can trace before 1955 are being valued against those prices while the scholars who would have to endorse them will not attend the conference.