In April 1881, French art critic Paul Mantz walked into the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, stopped in front of a 38-inch glass case, and felt immediate revulsion. Writing for Le Temps, he described the young girl standing inside as a "flower of precocious depravity," claiming her face was marked by the hateful promise of every vice.
The object that triggered his outrage was Edgar Degas's sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (La Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans). Today, bronze replicas of this figure sit quietly in major museums around the globe. Yet during its debut, viewers saw something alarming, ugly, and dangerously real.
Why did a sculpture of a ballet dancer cause such a scandal?
In 19th-century Paris, public sculpture followed strict rules. Statues were carved from smooth white marble or cast in polished dark bronze. They depicted idealized gods, historical heroes, or allegorical figures. Smooth surfaces distanced the viewer from reality.
Degas threw out that rulebook entirely. He molded his 38-inch figure from flesh-toned, pigmented beeswax over an iron frame. Then he dressed her in real clothes: a linen bodice, a muslin tutu, fabric ballet slippers, and a real human hair wig tied back with a green satin ribbon.
To top it off, Degas placed the finished piece inside a wooden-framed glass vitrine. In 1881, glass cases were used in natural history museums to display taxidermy animals, preserved medical organs, or criminal artifacts. By putting a wax girl with real hair inside a vitrine, Degas forced gallery visitors to look at her not as fine art, but as a scientific specimen.
Who was the actual model for the sculpture?
Her name was Marie van Goethem. She was born in 1865 to Belgian immigrant parents, a tailor and a laundress, living in Montmartre. Like many impoverished young girls in Paris, Marie joined the Paris Opéra Ballet as a student dancer, known colloquially as a petit rat.
These young dancers worked exhausting hours for tiny wages. The opera house was also a notorious hunting ground for wealthy male subscribers (abonnés) who frequented the backstage green room. For working-class families, sending a daughter into the ballet was often a desperate survival strategy.
Degas hired Marie to pose in his studio for dozens of preparatory drawings before building the wax figure. When the sculpture debuted, bourgeois gallery audiences recognized her working-class features immediately. Critics complained that her forehead and jaw resembled an "Aztec" or a "monkey," projecting their social anxieties about poverty and crime onto a fourteen-year-old child.
How did critics and fellow artists react to the work?
Most mainstream reviewers reacted with hostility. Critics accused Degas of bringing the morgue or the wax museum into a fine art gallery. They argued that art should uplift the spirit rather than document urban reality with clinical precision.
Not everyone hated it, though. The avant-garde writer Joris-Karl Huysmans called it "the only truly modern attempt I know in sculpture." He recognized that Degas had broken down the wall between traditional fine art and modern wall art.
The scandal left a deep mark on Degas. Although he continued sculpting in private for the rest of his life, creating over 150 wax models of dancers and horses in his studio, he never exhibited another sculpture in public again.
What happened to Marie van Goethem and the original wax figure?
Marie's story ended quietly. In 1882, a year after the exhibition, she was dismissed from the Paris Opéra Ballet for repeated absenteeism. She drifted out of historical record, leaving behind no known diary or late-life portrait.
Degas kept the original wax sculpture in a corner of his studio for 36 years. When he died in 1917, friends and heirs discovered the fragile figure alongside decades of dust. Between 1920 and 1922, the Hébrard foundry cast 28 bronze replicas from the original wax so the composition could survive, inspiring generations of museum displays and framed posters.
If you love historical dance studies or classic Impressionism art, visiting the original piece is still possible today. Collector Paul Mellon acquired the fragile wax original in 1956 and later gifted it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains on display in its protective glass case.
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