Dancer in the Role of Harlequin

Upon Degas's death in 1917, more than 150 figurative sculptures were found in his studio. Most were made of fragile wax, clay, and plastiline (a wax- and oil-based modeling material). Many had deteriorated. Only a few were preserved in copies that had been cast from them in plaster. Except for the wax Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (Washington: NGA) none of these sculptures had been publicly exhibited during the artist’s lifetime.

Although Degas had not favored reproducing his sculptures in more permanent materials, his heirs authorized that copies be cast in bronze in order to preserve the compositions and to sell them as finished works. Paul-Albert Bartholomé, a sculptor and Degas's longtime friend, prepared 72 of the figures for casting, a process executed by the distinguished Paris foundry A.-A. Hébrard et Cie. The quality of the Degas bronzes was tightly controlled and their edition was limited. Only twenty-two editions of the series of 72 figures were cast. Each bronze within the series was assigned a number from one to seventy-two. The first twenty editions were assigned a letter from A-T. In most cases these numbers and letters were incised on the individual bronzes. The series of 72 bronzes was completed before May 1921 when it was exhibited in Paris. Edition A, comprising the first and best casts of the series, was reserved for the important Impressionist collector Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer. She later acquired the first bronze cast of the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (lettered A, but not numbered), which had been omitted from the initial series. In 1929 Mrs. Havemeyer bequeathed Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer and 70 of the 72 Edition A Degas bronzes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Formerly called Dancer Rubbing Her Knee, this figure has been identified with Harlequin in a pastel dated 1885 now in the Art Institute of Chicago. The pastel is part of a series of seven depicting scenes from the ballet Les Jumeaux de Bergame, probably the production that had its first performance at the Paris Opéra on January 26, 1886. Degas is known to have attended rehearsals for it in July of 1885. The figure in the pastel wears Harlequin's domino costume and carries a baton or slapstick in her right hand with which she has presumably just felled another character in the ballet. In the sculpture, Degas has presented Harlequin nude, abandoning any attempt at narrative context and concentrating on the figure in motion.