Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years

A wax sculpture dressed in real fabric that scandalized Paris/Art & Sculpture

Edgar Degas exhibited the original wax figure at the 1881 Impressionist exhibition in Paris, where it shocked critics who found its realism unsettling. The figure wears a real cotton bodice, tutu, and satin hair ribbon. After Degas's death, about 28 bronze casts were made from the wax original, which is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.