Edgar Degas is the painter of ballet dancers: more than half of his works show dancers. Part of the reason was money: according to Wikipedia, ballet pictures sold well when his family’s fortune collapsed. The other part was movement, which he loved to draw. His most famous dancer, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, shocked Paris in 1881, and the real girl behind it has a story worth knowing.
I’m an adult hobby dancer, and Degas is the artist everyone sends me when they find out I take ballet. Pastel tutus on mugs, calendars, tote bags. But when I read about where those pictures came from, they turned out to be far less dreamy and far more interesting. Here’s the story, in plain English.
How many dancers did Degas paint?
A lot. Wikipedia’s Edgar Degas article says more than half of his works depict dancers. TheCollector’s guide to Degas and the Paris Opera Ballet gives the same share for his published works, and a 2004 Phoenix New Times preview of a Degas bronze show says the same of his pastels and oils. According to an excerpt quoted on ArtsJournal, the share rises to about two-thirds in his late career.
And it wasn’t just paintings. Dancers turn up in his pastels, his drawings, and his wax sculptures too.
Degas was born in Paris on July 19, 1834, and died there on September 27, 1917. Wikipedia says that although he’s counted among the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the label and preferred to call himself a realist. TheCollector notes the same thing. He also didn’t paint outdoors the way many Impressionists did. He worked indoors, in his studio, from memory, photographs, and live models.
Why he started: money and movement
His first major dance picture was Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source,” shown at the Salon of 1868. It’s a strange one: a scene from the ballet, complete with a horse drinking at a pool. It’s more like a stage set than a dance class.
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The real turn came in the 1870s. According to Wikipedia, his father died in 1874 and Degas learned that his brother René had run up huge business debts. Degas sold his house and the art collection he’d inherited to pay them off. For the first time, he had to live on what his art earned. Wikipedia says that from 1870 he painted ballet subjects more and more, partly because they sold well.
That’s the practical reason. The artistic reason is movement. Degas was a superb draftsman who was especially good at showing bodies in motion, and a ballet studio is full of them. His own line, recorded on Wikipedia, sums up his approach: “In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement.” Those “snapshot” moments in his pictures were planned, drawn, and redrawn.
He painted class, not curtain calls
This is the part I love as a ballet student. Degas mostly didn’t paint the pretty moment at the end of a performance. Wikipedia notes that in many of his paintings the dancers are backstage or in rehearsal, shown as professionals doing a job.
The Dancing Class (around 1870, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) is one of his earliest classroom scenes. Its Wikipedia entry says it introduced the things that keep coming back in his ballet series: the barre, the mirrors, and the bare floorboards. Anyone who has stood at a barre will recognize the room.
The Dance Class of 1874, also at the Met, is even more of a stage set than it looks. According to its Wikipedia entry, the class is imaginary. It’s led by the famous ballet master Jules Perrot, in the old Paris Opera building, which had burned down the year before. TheCollector also names Perrot as the teacher. The opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned the picture, and a poster on the wall for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell is a nod to him.
Look closely at his dancers and you’ll see stretching, waiting, resting, adjusting a shoe. If you want to know the names of the steps they’re practicing, my guide to the five ballet positions covers the basics.
The Little Dancer: the sculpture that shocked Paris
In 1881 Degas showed a sculpture at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition: the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Wikipedia’s Little Dancer article describes it as a wax figure dressed in a real bodice, tutu, and ballet slippers, with a wig of human hair. It was shown inside a glass case. TheCollector’s piece on why the Little Dancer caused a scandal describes the same wax, real fabric, and real hair.
Wikipedia notes that wax was an unusual medium for a sculpture at the time. There’s tension in her pose, too. Wikipedia describes her legs as being in something like fourth position at rest.
The critics were brutal. Several compared her to a monkey, according to Wikipedia and TheCollector, and one called her a “flower of precocious depravity.” Not everyone hated it. Joris-Karl Huysmans called it “the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know.”
Degas never showed a sculpture in public again. The Little Dancer was the only one he exhibited in his lifetime. Wikipedia, TheCollector, and the Phoenix New Times all agree on this. About 150 wax sculptures were found in his studio after his death. The bronze Little Dancers you see in museums today were cast after he died, at his heirs’ decision. Wikipedia counts at least 28 bronze casts, and their tutus vary from museum to museum.
Who was the real Little Dancer?
Her name was Marie van Goethem. According to Wikipedia’s article on her and NPR’s review of Camille Laurens’s book about her, she was born in Paris in 1865 to parents who had moved there from Belgium. Her mother was a laundress, and the family was poor.
Wikipedia says Marie and her younger sister were accepted into the Paris Opera’s dance school in 1878, and that Marie made her stage debut with the company in 1880. Young students like her were nicknamed “little rats,” as NPR’s review notes.
Her career didn’t last. She was dismissed from the Opera in 1882 for missing or being late to class. Wikipedia, NPR, and TheCollector all report this. After that, she drops out of the historical record. No one has found what became of her.
Her younger sister Charlotte had a very different story. According to Wikipedia, she became a dancer of some distinction and a teacher at the school, with a 53-year career at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Marie’s story has been retold many times. In 2014 the Kennedy Center premiered a musical, Little Dancer, with New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck as young Marie. Laurens’s book, which NPR reviewed in 2018, tries to find the person behind the sculpture.
The less pretty side of the Opera
The ballet world Degas painted wasn’t the world of today’s ballet schools. NPR’s review describes the life of the Opera’s young trainees as harsh. TheCollector explains that the abonnés, male patrons of the Opera, could pay to mingle with the dancers backstage, sometimes looking for more than conversation.
You can see this world in the pictures if you look. TheCollector points to the dark-suited men watching from the shadows in Degas’s The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage. In L’Étoile, there’s a man in black standing in the wings while the star dances. Once you notice those figures, the pictures read differently.
None of this makes the pictures less beautiful. But I think it makes them more honest. Degas wasn’t painting fairy tales. He was painting working dancers.
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His eyes, his pastels, and those blurry late dancers
Degas’s late dancers are looser and more colorful than his early ones. Part of that is the medium. By the later 1870s he had mastered pastel, which let him build up layers of color and texture.
Part of it may be his eyes. Wikipedia says his eyesight was found to be defective during rifle training in 1870, when he served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War. It got worse after 1890. He seems to have stopped working in 1912, and he spent his last years nearly blind. TheCollector also links his late, swirling dancers to his failing sight.
In the late 1880s he also took up photography, and some of his photographs of dancers became references for his drawings and paintings. Pictures like Blue Dancers (1897) and Dancers at the Barre show where all this led: big blocks of color, cropped bodies, dancers seen from odd angles.
Where to see Degas’s dancers in the US
You don’t have to go to Paris. According to Wikipedia’s Degas and Little Dancer articles, plus TheCollector, you can find Degas dance works in these US museums:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: The Dance Class (1874), The Dancing Class (around 1870), and a bronze Little Dancer
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: the original wax Little Dancer, from the collection of Paul Mellon
- Art Institute of Chicago: Ballet at the Paris Opera (1877) and On the Stage
- Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts: Entrance of the Masked Dancers (1879) and Dancers in the Classroom (1880)
- Detroit Institute of Arts: Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts (around 1891)
- Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballet Rehearsal (1873)
Works go on and off view, so check the museum’s website before you make a special trip.
How to look at a Degas like a dancer
Next time you see one, try this. First, find the barre, the mirror, or the floorboards. Then look at what the dancers are doing between steps: resting, stretching, waiting for their turn. Look at the skirts too; my guide to types of tutus explains how ballet skirts changed over time. If you spot a group in matching costumes behind a soloist, that’s the corps de ballet, which I explain in ballet company ranks.
And if a Degas makes you want to see ballet live, start with my list of ten ballets for beginners. For your first night at the theater, here’s what to wear and when to clap.
Spotted an error? Let me know.
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