Not a Pretty Ballerina: Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years

Step close to the sculpture and look at the girl's face: there's no bright smile here, none of the glamour of a performance about to begin. Her lips are set firm, her gaze fixed somewhere far away. Tension, fatigue, and worry are all still visible on her face. Degas wasn't trying to show a "pretty ballerina" — he wanted to capture the reality of what a young dancer had to endure backstage.

The model for this girl was a real fourteen-year-old student at the Paris Opera Ballet school. Young dancers at the time were nothing like the glamorous stars of the stage we might imagine — they were closer to poor laborers, enduring brutal training from morning until night. Degas wanted to show that reality honestly, without softening it.

He went further, using a real tutu, real ribbons, and even artificial hair on the sculpture. Mixing real fabric and found materials into sculpture this way was shockingly unconventional for the time, and when it was first exhibited, audiences reportedly found it unsettling — "too realistic, uncomfortably lifelike."