T his bronze depicts the subject that preoccupied Edgar Degas more than any other: the dancer. Dancers dominate the artist’s oeuvre and span a wealth of media including oil paintings, pencil sketches, chalk drawings and pastels (fig. 1). However, it was in sculpture that Degas found the freedom to properly express the seemingly boundless range of movement of the body. In these sculptures, Degas disregards the decorative element of the ballet to focus purely on movement. He arrives at the absolute essentiality of the body and its gestural power.

Toward the end of his life, Degas focused more on the dancer than on dance itself, depicting girls at rest or in recovery rather than actively performing. John Rewald explains: “It was in his passionate search for movement that all the statuettes of dancers doing arabesques, bowing, rubbing their knees… and so on were created. All of these women were caught in poses which represent one single instant, in an arrested movement which is pregnant with the movement just completed and the one about to follow” (John Rewald, Degas's Complete Sculpture, Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco, 1990, p. 23). In the present bronze, the dancer nimbly balances on one leg and turns around in a contrapposto to examine the bottom of her right foot, highlighting her agility and natural grace, seemingly unaware of her spectator.

The dancer in the foreground of Degas’ painting La Classe de Ballet also assumes a similar pose as she adjusts her right pointe-shoe (fig. 1). As described by Ann Dumas: “Sculpture for Degas was essentially private and experimental, an integral part of the inner creative processes that nurtured his art in all media” (Joseph S. Czestochowski and Anne Pingeot, eds., Degas Sculptures, Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes, Memphis, 2002, p. 47). Degas, in fact, only publicly exhibited one sculpture during his lifetime: Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, which was shown at the Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1881 (fig. 3). His statuettes can be seen as three-dimensional displays of his exploration of the human form, complementing his two-dimensional studies on paper. The tactile surface quality of the present work reflects Degas’ experimentation, and Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall wrote that he “energized [the models’] surfaces with knives, spatulas, finger-marks, and accidental effects” (Exh. Cat., Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts and Philadelphia,The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Degas and the Dance, 2002-03, pp. 245-246). As an insight into his creative mind and a representation of both movement and the ballet, two defining features of the artist’s oeuvre, the present work is a remarkable example of Degas’ sculptures.

Degas had a preference for a limited number of poses that he found particularly exciting, and he often created studies of the same pose in sketches and wax models. The pose of the dancer in the present work is clearly one that particularly moved the artist, as there are several known bronzes and drawings of girls in subtle variations of this position. In 1900, Degas decided to cast the wax model of the present work into a plaster cast (fig. 2). As Richard Kendall writes, “The present three-dimensional study is generally considered the first of the series, the most elegantly poised and certainly the most highly finished. Famously reluctant to declare his work complete, Degas not only considered this example sufficiently resolved to be preserved in a more permanent form but chose to display the plaster where he knew it would be seen by his acquaintances” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Biennale: Galerie d’Orsayand London, The Lefevre Gallery, The Lost Plasters of Edgar Degas).

In his essay about this important sculpture, Richard Kendall positions Danseuse regardant la plante de son pied droit in the context of Degas’ sculptural oeuvre as one of the most significant works of his later years: “Degas’ sculpture is at the same time one of the most familiar and least understood aspects of his art. More than a thousand bronze casts of his racehorses, ballet-dancers and bathing nudes, are scattered in collections throughout the world, while the twenty or so variants of the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years are universally known and widely celebrated (fig. 2). The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which was shown in the 1881 Impressionist exhibition, marks a high point in Degas’ naturalism, grander in scale but comparable in its precision to the superbly observed and almost contemporary Spanish Dance. By contrast, Danseuse regardant la plante de son pied droit belongs to Degas’ later sculptural ambition, now less documentary and quotidian, more concerned with reverie, equilibrium and expressive form. Even more audacious structures from the artist’s last years reveal the breadth of his three-dimensional range, earning him a place alongside the most innovative sculptors of his age and attracting the admiration of later practitioners from Pablo Picasso to Anthony Caro” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Biennale: Galerie d’Orsayand London, The Lefevre Gallery, The Lost Plasters of Edgar Degas 1996, p. 1).

Upon the artist’s death in 1917, over 150 pieces of sculpture were found in Degas’s studio and in 1918 a selection of approximately 70 sculptures were authorized for casting by the A.-A. Hébrard foundry in Paris. The series of twenty casts of each model were lettered A to T in addition to one for the Degas family heirs and another to be retained by the foundry.