The Girl in the Glass Case
She stood two-thirds life size, dressed in a real tutu and human hair — and the critics who saw her in 1881 recoiled as if she were something obscene.
When Edgar Degas unveiled La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, he broke almost every rule of sculpture as Paris understood it. The figure was not carved in marble or cast in bronze but modeled in pigmented beeswax over a metal armature, rope, and clay-covered paintbrushes. She wore a real bodice, a real tutu, real ballet slippers, and a wig of actual human hair. Only her hair, ribbon, and tutu were left uncoated by wax; everything else bore the sculptor's hand.
The model was Marie van Goethem, a Belgian teenager enrolled at the Paris Opera Ballet school. Degas had originally planned to exhibit the piece in 1880 but withdrew it, showing an empty glass case instead — the sculpture wasn't ready. A year later, the case held her: arms taut, legs set in a ballet fourth position, her body caught mid-effort rather than posed sweetly. One writer later described her expression as that of 'a sickly, gawky adolescent who is being made to do something she doesn't totally want to do.'
The public reaction split violently. Joris-Karl Huysmans called it 'the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know.' Others were vicious: critic Paul Mantz branded her the 'flower of precocious depravity,' with a face 'marked by the hateful promise of every vice.' She was compared to a monkey, to an Aztec. Displayed under glass like a classical relic, dressed in real clothes and hair, she unsettled viewers precisely because she blurred the line between sculpture and person.
The exact nature of the relationship between Degas and his young model remains debated and was never conclusively established as anything beyond artist and subject. What is certain is that Marie's life outside the studio was precarious. She was the middle of three sisters, daughters of a Belgian tailor in Paris; after their father died, their mother took in laundry to survive. All three girls trained as dancers, and Degas — a fixture at the Paris Opera, famous for painting dancers backstage rather than onstage — used them as models. Marie was expelled from the ballet school in 1882 for repeated lateness, and newspapers of the era described her dismissively as a girl of poor morals.
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