# The Price That Belongs to Another Object > Degas made one Little Dancer and never sold it. The 41.6 million dollars paid in 2022 was for a bronze cast a decade after his death, and it is filed under his name as a record. > The Study - 2026-08-27 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-price-that-belongs-to-another-object/ ## Key points - Degas made one Little Dancer, exhibited it once in 1881, and never sold it. The National Gallery of Art, which has held the wax since 1999, puts it plainly: bronze replicas fill museums around the world, but the artist himself only created one. - The figure quoted as the Degas sculpture record belongs to a different object. The bronze sold at Christie's in May 2022 for 36 million dollars hammer, 41.6 million with fees, was cast in 1927, ten years after Degas died, from a wax he never put on the market. - The substitution is systematic, not occasional. Across this archive the priced object is regularly a posthumous cast, another example of the same model, a comparable work by the same maker, or a whole collection of which the object was one part. - Some objects generate no price at all because they never entered the market. John Harrison's four marine timekeepers passed from their maker directly into state ownership by statute and have never been sold, so no hammer, premium, estimate or valuation exists for any of them. - A private purchase produces an invoice rather than a price. The Cleveland Museum bought its life-size bronze Apollo from a dealer in 2004; the figures repeated in print are journalistic, and the museum has not published what it paid. - The consequence for anyone measuring the market is that price data is a survivorship sample. The objects that define quality are disproportionately the ones that never sold, and their names carry figures earned by something else. ## A price attaches to a name, and the name is not the object ## Degas made one Little Dancer and it has never been for sale ## The record price is for a cast made ten years after the artist died ## The Galle hand has no price, and the figures quoted for it are other glass ## Some objects were never on the market at all ## A private purchase produces an invoice, not a price ## What this does to anyone measuring the market The most valuable objects in this archive are disproportionately the ones with no price, and the figures the market keeps under their makers' names were earned by casts, by other examples, by comparable works and by whole collections. That is not a scandal and nobody in the chain is lying; each individual number is accurate for the lot that produced it. The error happens in transmission, when a figure crosses the short distance from a lot description to an artist's name and loses the object on the way. So put the object before the sum. Say what physically changed hands, say whether the number includes the premium, and where the thing under discussion has never been sold, write that down and leave the space empty. An honest blank is a stronger statement about an object than a real price belonging to something else. ## Questions **Has Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen ever been sold at auction?** The wax that Degas made has not. It is National Gallery of Art 1999.80.28 and has been in institutional or single private hands since 1956, passing to the museum by bequest. The objects that appear at auction are posthumous bronzes cast after Degas died in 1917. **What is the auction record for a Degas sculpture?** A posthumous bronze commissioned from the Hebrard foundry in 1927 sold at Christie's New York on 12 May 2022 from the Anne H. Bass collection. It hammered at 36 million dollars against a 20 to 30 million estimate and made 41.6 million with fees, which The Art Newspaper reported as a record for the artist in that medium. **How many Little Dancer casts exist?** The Sotheby's catalogue for the June 2015 sale recorded twenty-nine identified casts, twenty-seven of them bronze and two plaster, in addition to the modele bronze and the original wax. **Why do some records in this archive list auction results for other objects?** Because the object itself has never been sold and a reader still needs to know what its class trades for. Every such entry is labelled as not being the object of the record, and the alternative, an empty field, would tell a reader nothing at all. **Is a private sale price comparable to an auction price?** No. A private treaty sale publishes no hammer and no buyer's premium, is not competitively bid, and is reported by whichever party chooses to report it. Placing such a figure in a series of auction results compares numbers that were produced by different mechanisms. **Why do some famous objects have no price at all?** Because they never entered the market. John Harrison's four marine timekeepers passed to the state by statute in 1765 and 1766, the Unicorn Tapestries went by private sale and then gift to the Metropolitan Museum, and no object from the Cheapside Hoard has ever been offered at public auction. ## Sources - [1] National Gallery of Art, Washington, 'Edgar Degas Only Made One Little Dancer. And It's Ours.', 18 August 2023. The museum's account of the wax, accession 1999.80.28: its construction over a lead pipe armature with paintbrushes in the arms, the cotton bodice, tutu, linen slippers and human hair wig; the single public exhibition in 1881; and the heirs' commissioning of the bronze casts after Degas's death in 1917. - [2] Judd Tully, 'Christie's 20th century evening sales in New York bring $831.3m and set new record for Ernie Barnes', The Art Newspaper, 13 May 2022. Reports the Petite danseuse de quatorze ans bronze, cast in 1927 from the wax model of about 1879 to 1881, sold from the Anne H. Bass collection for 36 million dollars hammer against an estimate of 20 to 30 million, or 41.6 million with fees, a record for the artist in that medium. - [3] National Gallery of Art, Washington, collection record for Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Edgar Degas, 1878 to 1881, accession 1999.80.28, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. - [4] Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection record for 'The Cleveland Apollo: Apollo Sauroktonos (Lizard-Slayer) or Apollo the Python-Slayer', accession 2004.30, credit line Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund. Confirms the object entered the collection as a purchase in 2004; no price is published by the museum.