Edgar Degas - Ballerinas and the Scandal of Looking

Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Painted bronze with muslin and silk on wooden base,1880–1, cast c.1922 

(Image Credit: Tate website) 

Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, 1874, oil on canvas 

(Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art website)

Edgar Degas, Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, ca. 1874, oil paint mixed with turpentine, watercolour, and pastel over pen-and-ink drawing on paper, mounted on canvas (Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art website)

For the last week of Censored and Scandalous, I’ve decided to look at three artworks together, some of Degas’ ballerinas; Impressionist masterpieces, which used to be my favourite … 

When Edgar Degas first exhibited Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, some viewers recoiled. The wax figure, dressed in a real tutu, satin ribbon, and even with real hair, felt too lifelike and far too unsettling. One critic, Paul Mantz, infamously described her as the “flower of precocious depravity,” with a face “marked by the hateful promise of every vice” and “bearing the signs of a profoundly heinous character.” Others dismissed the work as “hideous,” comparing it to a specimen from a natural history museum. The scandal lay in the collision between art and reality: Degas had knocked sculpture off its idealising pedestal and replaced marble perfection with a working child.

The model, Marie van Goethem, was one of the petits rats of the Paris Opéra, young and often impoverished girls who trained relentlessly under the watchful eyes of male instructors and wealthy patrons. Degas had unusually intimate access to this world. As a close friend of the celebrated ballet choreographer Jules-Joseph Perrot, he was allowed into rehearsals even before officially joining the Opéra’s circle. This privileged access, a favour rarely granted, is unsettling in itself. Degas claimed he wanted to study movement “as organically as possible,” sketching backstage and then painting in his studio. He invited dancers into his workspace, observing their fatigue, their discipline, their unguarded moments. To contemporary viewers, this obsessive observation exists in a complicated space between empathy and exploitation. His art transforms labouring bodies into aesthetic spectacle.

In Little Dancer, Marie stands in a posture of forced poise: chin lifted, shoulders tense, legs braced. The real fabric of her costume collapses the distance between artwork and flesh. She is neither idealised nor romanticised, but achingly real, appearing as something more than a child. For Degas’s audience, that realism was shocking precisely because it revealed the world beneath the illusion of grace.

A few years earlier, The Dance Class, had already exposed this tension. The canvas shows young dancers stretching, waiting, and wilting under the scrutiny of Perrot. The elegant room feels airless; its beauty is undercut by exhaustion. Behind the satin and mirrors lay an entire system of discipline and desire, one in which young girls relied on wealthy male patrons for advancement, protection, and sometimes survival. Rumours of exploitation were widespread: ballerinas who spent more time with patrons backstage were rewarded with better roles onstage. The ballet’s charm disguised a darker economy.

Degas documented this hierarchy repeatedly. In works such as The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, older men lounge at the fringes of the stage, watching the girls’ bodies mid-rehearsal. Their presence is not incidental: subscribers paid for access not only to performances, but, as curator Ann Dumas notes, “for the girls, socially.” Degas frequently observed this ritual and, by his own admission, participated in the same privileged system of looking. Whether every rumour is fact or fiction, these dynamics formed the foundation of the corps de ballet in the Belle Époque.

These paintings and sculptures, endlessly reproduced today, reveal the uncomfortable underbelly of the 19th-century ballerina’s world. Degas depicted ballet with rose-coloured luminosity, yet the reality behind the scenes was far harsher: gruelling hours, punishing training, and the constant gaze of powerful men. His works memorialise this world even as they obscure its darkest edges.

To look at these works now is to recognise their duality: tender yet troubling, empathetic yet complicit. Degas’s scandal lies not in any single image, but in the act of looking itself. His dancers mirror the modern viewer: drawn in by beauty, made uneasy by what that beauty conceals. The ballerinas of the Paris Opéra were children with little autonomy, shaped by systems far larger than themselves. Degas captured the truth of their world, but he also participated in its dynamics.

This scandal is quieter than some others in this series, but no less important. It reminds us that not all that appears graceful is innocent, and that art’s loveliest subjects may carry the heaviest histories.