Edgar Degas

Degas created numerous studies of figures in transitional poses as resources for his paintings and as guides to understanding movement. This sculpture was not intended for exhibition, but was cast in bronze after Degas’s death.

The dancer leans forward into an arabesque, extending her arms and balancing on one foot as she lifts her left leg backward. The British artist Walter Sickert (the figure standing apart from the group in Degas’s pastel Six Friends at Dieppe) saw the wax model for this work while visiting Degas’s studio, and was struck when Degas “turned the statuette slowly to show me the successive silhouettes thrown on a white sheet by the light of a candle.”