The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer

In April 1880 Degas listed a sculpture in the Impressionist exhibition catalogue and built a glass case for it. It stood empty for the whole show. A year later he tried again. The vitrine went up at the opening and the wax girl meant to fill it arrived weeks into the run. Paris knew cases like that from natural history displays, and several reviewers took the hint. One wrote that she belonged in a museum of zoology or medicine. Another called her a flower of precocious depravity. She was Marie van Goethem, a pupil at the Paris Opera's ballet school, and in 1882 the Opera struck her name from its roster after she missed 11 classes in a single month. Degas never showed a sculpture in public again. What stands here is bronze, cast in 1922, five years after he died, from the wax he kept in his studio, and the tutu is modern cotton, remade in 2018 by a conservator at the Met who cut it longer than the skirt it replaced.