Dancer with Hands on Hips

The marble behind this plaster was carved for Joséphine, Napoleon's first wife, between 1806 and 1812. By the time it was finished he had divorced her, and she lived on at Malmaison, her house outside Paris, still with the title of empress. The statue was shown at the Paris Salon. Then the empire fell. In the spring of 1814 the allied armies entered Paris, the Russian emperor Alexander I called on Joséphine at Malmaison, and that May she died. In 1815 Alexander bought the dancer, and the marble is in Saint Petersburg, at the Hermitage, to this day. This full-size plaster is a cast Canova made from it, a girl on her toes with her hands on her hips, caught in the middle of a step. He had worked the pose out first in drawings and in painted studies on paper and canvas, many of which are kept at Bassano del Grappa, near his home town of Possagno.