Interpretive Resource

This is one of two known sculptural studies by Edgar Degas treating a Spanish theme. Degas may have chosen this pose—called a cambré, or bend from the waist—after seeing Edouard Manet’s painting Spanish Dance (1862; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection), which includes two dancers posed in a similar manner, at a retrospective of the artist’s work in 1883. Degas was probably also influenced by an 1837 bronze by Jean Auguste Barre of the ballerina Fanny Elssler, who achieved her greatest success performing the cachucha, a Spanish dance featured in a ballet choreographed by Jean Coralli.

Of the more than one hundred fifty wax sculptures that Degas produced, he exhibited just one and sold none. Only after his death were seventy-three of the waxes cast in bronze. Why did the artist make sculptures if he did not intend to display them in a permanent form? The answer lies in his compositional methods. Degas characteristically explored poses from various angles and experimented with reversals and tracings. Sculpture came to play an important role in this process, supplementing his life studies and allowing him to examine a figure from all points of view. Furthermore, because Degas made his sculptures on a small scale and with malleable materials, he could adjust their contours and lines to create new positions.

In Spanish Dance, Degas displayed his typical interest in the fine points of posture. With a flourish, the figure reaches her right arm over her head, curves her left arm in front of her torso, and bends back, thrusting her left hip to the side. Somewhat surprisingly, given Degas’ interest in various ethnic dance styles, he did not explore Spanish dance themes in a sustained manner; this dramatic pose does not appear in any of the artist’s known two-dimensional work.