Edgar Degas was the Impressionist painter who also created sculptures, including *The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years*.
Degas is especially famous for paintings and pastels of ballet dancers, rehearsals, racecourses, cafés, and intimate scenes of daily life. He was associated with the Impressionists, though he preferred careful drawing, indoor subjects, and controlled composition to the group’s more consistent emphasis on outdoor light and plein-air painting.
His best-known sculpture is *The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years*, begun around 1880. The figure represents Marie van Goethem, a Belgian student at the Paris Opera Ballet school. Degas made the original in pigmented beeswax with a metal armature and added real hair, a cloth tutu, and other materials. When shown in Paris in 1881, its unusually realistic appearance and mixed-media construction startled critics.
Degas’s sculpture was not widely known during his lifetime; the 1881 exhibition was his only public showing of sculpture. After his death, about 150 wax sculptures were found in his studio, many damaged. Selected works were later cast in bronze, which explains why museums today display bronze versions even though Degas himself did not cast these bronzes.