LONDON.- Stair Sainty is exhibiting a bronze of Edgar Degas’s iconic sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which records the sculpture’s pose as it appeared at the 1881 Impressionist Exhibition. This follows the recent publication of a monograph on the work by art historian Dr Gregory Hedberg, in which he demonstrates that the bronzes known to museum visitors around the world, from the Tate, London, to the Metropolitan Museum, New York to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, actually represent Degas’s reworking of the original sculpture.

Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen) depicts a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet school, a Belgian girl named Marie van Goethem. The wax sculpture, found in Degas’s studio after his death in 1917, was cast in bronze over a forty odd year period beginning in 1922 at the Hébrard foundry (known as the Hébrard bronzes) until it went out of business in 1935 and then at the Valsuani foundry. The plaster cast (referred to as the Valsuani plaster) after its earlier incarnation was found at the Valsuani foundry in the mid-1990s when the present bronze was cast. In his book, Degas's Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen: The Earlier Version That Helped Spark the Birth of Modern Art, Hedberg contends that not only is this a cast of the original 1881 wax sculpture, but that it was made in Degas's lifetime.

Says Guy Stair Sainty: ‘Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen is one of the most renowned examples of Western art and the discovery of the plaster, which as Dr Hedberg has convincingly argued records the wax as it was presented in 1881, gives us a better understanding of Degas and his artistic development. The startling differences with the bronzes cast from the wax found in Degas’s studio after his death and the bronze we will show are a revelation and explain why contemporary descriptions of the 1881 wax better match the bronze that will be presented at the Stair Sainty Gallery.’

The process of casting in Degas’s time began with a plaster mould made from the original wax, with a plaster figure cast from that mould. This plaster was then used to make the mould from which the bronzes were cast - the first plaster from the wax as it appeared in 1881 was used to create the present bronze. The original wax (now in the National Gallery, Washington DC) was then altered substantially by Degas - the plaster used to make the mould from which the Hébrard bronzes were made was created after the artist's death in 1922 (patinated to resemble bronze, it is now in the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska). All the bronzes made from Degas waxes were cast posthumously. One of the Hébrard bronzes recently sold at Sotheby’s in 2015 for $24.9 million.