ITHE WORLD OF THE LITTLE DANCERMESOLITARY BALLERINAIthas been the unfortunate fateoftheLlnleDancerA,tedFourteento be singled outfor its uniqueness- as the only sculpture exhibited by Degas in his lifetime, as thelargestwork he ever attempted in three dimensions, and as a curious, evenfreakish, portraitofayoung ballerina in wax, hair, and fabric. In a way that isprofoundly misleading, this perception has set theLittleDancerapart from Degas'other works of art and froth most aspectsofthe historical context that gave itthrilland meaning. Though the sculpture has been endlessly cited and admired, littleattention has been paid to the gradual evolutionofthe figure of the young balletdancer in Degas' earlier paintings and pastels, or to the stubborn survival of thesculpture'sforntin his subsequent imagery. In asimilarway, few attempts havebeen made to understand theLittle Dancer Aged Fourteenagainst the backgroundof training and rehearsal in late nineteenth-century ballet, a subject on whichDegas himself was conspicuously well informed. Divorced from these circum-stances,Degas' wax statuette has also remained strangely detached from thesculptural history of the period, as if it had been made in a creative vacuum andwithoutreference to the technical concerns of other practitioners, a numberofwhom - it note transpires - the artist knew at first hand. Too often seen inisolation, theLittle Daruerhas been over-simplified and reduced to a near cipher,despite the widely varying responses of its first audiences, the profound ambiguityof its physical appearance, and continuinguncertaintyabout many of its originalfeatures.The more closely we examine theLittleDancer Aged Fourteenand the visualculture towhich it belonged, thesnoreevident are its roots in current practice andin the complex development of Degas" career. During the 1870s, Degas hademerged from professional obscurity to enjoy critical acclaim as the leader of amajor Faction of the Impressionist group,progressivelyabandoning the restraint ofhisformativevears in favor of a kind of technical and thematic bravado. Alreadyin his Laud forties when he began the sculpture, Degas wassimultaneouslyinvolved in aredefinitionof his realist project, pushing his skills and materialresources to their linut and subverting many of the conventions that had formerlysustained his art.Now known to his peers as "the painter of dancers," Degasincreasingly used the subject of the ballet to break new compositional ground orcross pictorial frontiers, such as those between pastel and printmaking or betweenthe depiction of public spectacle and private behavior. As we move toward theend of the decade, the figure of the solitary dancer becomes the focus of much ofhis attention, demandingnew strategies of material and psychological expressionandFindingits ultimate form in a one-meter-high, partly colored sculpture of ayoung ballet pupil.Without proposing theLittleDatuerAoedFourteenas a self-portrait of the artist in any but the most metaphorical sense, it is still possible tosee this defiant, contained work ofart as an emblem of Degas' maturity as he, too,faced a variously hostile and appreciative audience.Few studies of the theme have taken into account the very beginnings of Degas'engagement with the dance. In the 1850s and 1860s. during his apprentice years,the artist made more than a dozen varied and separate renderings of the subject,based on classical sculptures and paintings by other artists as well as first-handencounters with stage performances and groups of decorous or bucolic waltzers.'Thoughlittlemore than sketches, these works announce Degas' awareness of asocially diverse tradition and perhaps his first assessment of their contemporarypotential. This potential was not to be tested until about 1867, when he embarkedon:MlleFiocre in the Ballet "La Source," a large and richly worked canvasshowinga leading ballerina of the day posed on stage between two ornately dressedattendants and a real horse. the latter inclining its head to drink at a theatricalstream.-Exhibited at the Salon of1868,when the novelist and criticEmileZolarather surprisingly compared its palette of silvers and russets to that of a Japaneseprint, this picture prefigured Degas' activities at the time of the making of theLittleDancerA,cdFourteen in a number of curious ways.' Initially planned in aseries of drawings, the posture of Eugenie Fiocre was also studied in the nude -presumably from a hired model -just as the Little Dancer was to find its earliestform in drawn and modeled studies of the naked figure. Eugenie Fiocre is shownin a setting at the Paris Opera (where the dancer who posed for theLittleDancerAgedFourteen was later to perform), where Fiocre, too, attracted the attentions ofa number of painters and sculptors. Most famously, Fiocre was immortalized in alife-size bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux that was cast in several materials andreduced-scale replicas; it is less well known that Degas himself expressed hisappreciation of one of these models at the end of his life.' In a final coincidence,Degas' picture of the dancer has often been linked with his own first experimentin sculpture, a modest figurine of a drinking horse that corresponds in mostrespects to its painted counterpart.'Within a short space of time, Degas followed these faltering experiments witha sequence of more accomplished equestrian models and a group of small, radicalcanvases of dance scenes, showing notjust events on stage but fractured glimpsesof the audience, the orchestra pit, and the theater itself. A work like theMuseed'Orsay'sOrchestraoftheOpera of around 1870, with its looming musicians anddistant view of the truncated corps de ballet, attracted both praise and patronagefor the aspiring artist, initiating a life-long public association with the ballet andthe appropriation of a distinctive spatial and technical vocabulary." Soon thecriticswere on his trail; "The dance foyer is his predilection," announced ErnestChesneau in 1874, while EtienneCarjatclaimed that such scenes were "finelyobserved and ingeniously rendered," and Ernest d'Hervilly suggested that Degas'ballet pictures "would soon fascinate Paris."' PhilippeBurrywas more expansive:"Thereis as yet no-one," he wrote,"whohas made such portraits of the dancer,the ccryphee,made of gauze and bone, with emaciated arms, tired waist, balancedbody, legs with that distinctively professional beauty whose multiple facets makeup the general beauty