Little Dancer of Fourteen Years
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (French: "La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans") is a sculpture begun c. 1880 by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a Belgian named Marie van Goethem.
Les Choristes
Appreciation for the work, as part of those Degas showed in 1877, did not diminish with the passage of time. In 1897, when the work was put on exhibit at the Musée du Luxembourg, Léonce Bénédite called "Les Choristes" part of a group of "acute, ironic and cruel observations ... the work of a firm, sure hand [and] just, sensible eye." He called them "little masterpieces" that a public not generally aware of Degas's genius had done well to acquire.