Edgar Degas

Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot is a maquette-sized bronze sculpture by French artist Edgar Degas. The work depicts a female nude standing on her left foot with her left arm outstretched, while clutching her upturned right foot in her right hand. The body is twisted as the figure looks backward to examine the sole of her foot. The surface of the sculpture is textured showing visible signs of the artist’s modelling process, including thumb indentations, finger marks, brushstrokes and scratches. In several places, including on the buttocks and the top of the left foot, small flat pieces of modelling material have been adhered but not blended and as a result small distinct lumps are evident on the surface of the form. The figure’s left hand is truncated – with no delineation of fingers or a palm – and similarly her right hand lacks definition and appears to meld directly into her right foot. There is a black-brown patina on the bronze that remains true to its original colour in the crevices, but has worn to a rich reddish brown elsewhere on the work’s surface.

Degas modelled Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot in around 1910–11 at 37 Rue Victor-Massé in Paris, the building in which he lived and worked for twenty-two years. This work forms part of a series of statuettes made by Degas between 1890 and 1911 and was cast after his death. Preferring an improvisational method of working when sculpting, Degas mixed plasteline and wax, built his own makeshift armatures and, as curator Charles W. Millard has observed, stuffed the forms with ‘the strangest of materials’ such as sponges, matches, cork discs and cloth plugs (Millard, The Sculpture of Edgar Degas, New Jersey 1976, p.37).

The art historian John Rewald has noted that Degas’s penchant for unusual and difficult poses led to the collapse of many of his sculptures (see Rewald 1990, pp.24–7). Degas’s ambition with these works was to capture women in their daily activities and natural movements, but as he was nearly blind at this period he was obliged, according to curator Ronald Alley, ‘to sit very close to the model and to check the position of the muscles or curves of the haunch by feeling them with his hand’ (see Alley 1981, p.155). One of Degas’s models reported posing for him in 1910 in the posture depicted in Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot, claiming that the sittings continued for several months, sometimes twice a day, four sittings a week. Although the work advanced well, Degas was never satisfied. According to the model he kept trying to improve it by raising the knee or turning the torso, and in the end it fell to pieces (see Alley 1981, p.155).

Degas’s unconventional method of modelling has meant that the majority of his statuettes did not survive. Those that did were found in his studio after his death in 1917 and transferred by his close friend the sculptor Barholomé to the cellar of the founder A.A. Hébrard, who began producing posthumous bronze casts of Degas’s sculptures at the end of 1919. Using a highly accurate method of reproduction known as lost wax casting, Hébrard was (according to Rewald) able to remain extremely close to Degas’s originals. Rewald has argued that the complicated lost wax method has the greatest advantage over all other methods since ‘it achieves the highest possible fidelity to the original whose very surface, the surface kneaded by the artist is so faithfully reproduced that even the fingerprints reappear on the bronze casts’ (Rewald in Czestochowski and Pingeot 2002, p.280). Several other examples of Degas’s works that were cast posthumously by Hébrard exist in the Tate collection, including Grande Arabesque c.1885–90 (Tate N05917), Dancer Putting on her Stocking c.1900 (Tate N05918) and Dancer at Rest, her Hands on her Hips, Right Leg Forward c.1890 (Tate N05920).

Further reading
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.155–6, reproduced p.155.
John Rewald, Degas’s Complete Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco 1990, pp.24–7.
John Rewald, ‘Edgar Degas: Original Wax Sculptures’, in Joseph S. Czestochowski and Anne Pingeot (eds.), Degas Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes, Memphis 2002, pp.280–1, reproduced p.253.

Judith Wilkinson
March 2016

Supported by Christie’s.