Throwback Thursday and Marie van Goethem
Born on June 7, 1865, Marie van Goethem was the real life
dancer that posed for the famous sculpture Little
Dancer Aged Fourteen, by Edgar Degas. It was the only sculpture he ever
displayed during his lifetime. In 1881, when the finished statue was unveiled, Marie
was a member of the corps de ballet in the Paris Opera. She had joined the
dance school there in 1878, at age twelve and had recently been promoted to the
corps.
Her early life was one of poverty and her family moved often, probably because
they couldn’t pay the rent. Her father died in 1870, leaving her mother to raise
Marie and her two sisters alone. This was the time of the Franco-Prussian War
which made living conditions even worse, and the family did whatever was
necessary to survive.
Degas modeled the statue by hand from wax, and the process took
two years. He appears to have portrayed Marie in a way that captured the
reality of her world: a brutal and unforgiving one where she was often
exhausted, thin, and hungry. This may be why the statue didn’t sell, and it
became his most controversial work.
After that first exhibition, Degas never display the statue
again. Instead he kept it with him and jokingly referred to her as his “daughter”.
When he died in 1917, the sculpture was
cast in bronze, and several of these bronzes are now in major museums. The original
wax sculpture is believed to have been lost or destroyed.
A later work, a pastel entitled Dancer with Long Hair Bowing, shows Marie later in her career, now
a soloist in the company. But what happened to her after that remains a mystery.
If her life ended, as it began, in poverty, she would have been buried in a
pauper’s unmarked grave.
From the Big Blue Book of Ballet Secrets:
Ballet Secret #15p:
“Marie van Goethem
was the young model for the famous Degas sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.”
Link of the Day:
Quote
of the Day:
“A painting requires a little mystery,
some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly
plain you end up boring people”
― Edgar Degas
― Edgar Degas
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