It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies.
This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science.
Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred - of dancers, horses, and bathers - were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina’s tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description.
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