Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Degas died in Paris in September 1917, and in his studio his heirs found dozens of small wax figures, many of them damaged, that he had modelled for himself and never had cast. In May 1918, with the war still six months from its end, the family signed a contract with the founder Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard to put them into bronze. This figure, by far the largest of them and dressed in real fabric in its wax form, needed its own treatment. Hébrard's caster, an Italian named Albino Palazzolo, first took a plaster from the wax and made the bronzes from that, so the wax itself survived, and it is now in Washington. Each run of casts was marked with a letter, and on the base of this one the foundry stamp ends in a P. The Louvre bought it in 1931 with help from the heirs and the Hébrard family, and like every cast it was fitted afterwards with a tulle skirt and a satin ribbon in the hair.