Edgar Degas, The Little Fourteen-Year Old Dancer, 1960s, Bronze

The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer - Sculpture Model Bronze, casting, two-tone patina Height 123 × 47 × 41 cm France, Paris, 1960s Cast by the A.-A. Hébrard et Cie Artistic Bronze Foundry Author’s model signature in Latin script: “Degas” The model from which the present bronze casting was executed belongs to the French Impressionist artist Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas, known under the pseudonym “Degas” (1834–1917). Edgar Degas was also widely renowned as a sculptor—among other achievements, he laid the foundations of Expressionism within animalier sculpture. His sculpture “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” was executed in 1880 for an exhibition in Paris and became one of his most celebrated sculptural works. A bronze cast of this model is held in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as well as in the renowned Tate Gallery, for which a cast was produced in the 1920s. After Degas’s death, the studio models of his sculptural works (150 in total) were acquired by the esteemed A.-A. Hébrard et Cie Artistic Bronze Foundry in Paris—specialists in casting original models by leading European sculptors. Between 1919 and 1922, Hébrard et Cie cast 73 of Degas’s models in bronze. Thereafter, the foundry reproduced in bronze the 17 most distinguished of Degas’s models, among them the sculpture “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer.” The present sculpture is an original and exclusive example of a studio work—that is, executed to commission in a French artistic foundry-atelier—of a small-scale interior bronze sculpture. By virtue of its artistic and stylistic attributes, fabrication technique in the material, dimensions, weight, the particularities of its two-tone decorative patination and their combination, and on the basis of the deciphered reproduction of the author’s model signature—and taking into account known comparanda—this bronze casting of “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” may be dated to the 1960s and attributed to studio productions by Parisian bronze casters. The sculpture under consideration is executed at a high artistic and technical level. It presents artistic, museum, and collector interest.