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.
After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself
Nine of Degas' pastel drawings of women at their bath were exhibited by Theo Van Gogh at Galerie Boussod et Valadon in 1888. The work was shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1950 and was bought for the collection of the National Gallery, London in 1959. A less highly worked example of a similar subject is in the Courtauld Gallery, and other works in the series are in many public museums.
The work had a considerable influence on Francis Bacon, most noticeably on his triptychs "Three Figures in a Room" (1964, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and "Three Studies of the Male Back" (1970, Kunsthaus Zürich). The Tate Gallery says "For Bacon [it] was indeed something of a talisman. It epitomised Degas's approach to a larger obsession the two artists shared with the plasticity of the body, its potential for the most varied forms of articulation, in movement and repose." The work was one of three central nudes chosen by Bacon in his "The Artist's Choice" exhibition at the National Gallery in 1985, shown between Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" and Michelangelo's "Entombment". Art historian and curator Michael Peppiatt quoted Bacon thus: "I love Degas. I think his pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they're far greater than his paintings."