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.
Edgar Degas
Degas created a substantial number of other sculptures during a span of four decades, but they remained unseen by the public until a posthumous exhibition in 1918. Neither "The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" nor any of Degas's other sculptures were cast in bronze during the artist's lifetime. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".