Degas first turned his attention to the Paris Opéra in the 1860s, and here was able to study the unguarded gestures of dancers at rest alongside the highly prescribed positions of the classical ballet. His preoccupation with the subject of dancers took form across all mediums, and are amongst the most iconic images in his oeuvre.

In the privacy of his studio Degas produced numerous sculptures only one of which he ever exhibited – ‘Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer’. Upon Degas’s death in 1917, his studio was discovered to have many original wax, clay and plastiline models in varying degrees of completeness and deterioration.

Degas’s heirs authorised seventy-four of the statuettes salvaged from the studio to be cast in bronze. For this important and very delicate process they felt the only foundry capable of affecting this transformation to bronze was that of Adrien Hébrard and his master founder Albino Palazzolo. Of the 22 casts of each sculpture produced, one additional set was kept by Degas’s heirs and another by Hébrard. Palazzolo was also granted permission by Hébrard to cast a limited number of examples for his own private collection. Palazzolo chose only the most prized of Degas’s models, one of which being ‘Danseuse, arabesque ouverte sur la jambe droite, bras droit à terre’.

The arabesque is amongst the hardest of positions for a dancer to perform. Balancing on the singular, slender vertical of the leg, the dancer’s body hinges forward, creating a pose at once graceful and precarious. Degas was so captivated by the arabesque, it appeared in eight of the models found in his studio as well as many drawings and paintings between 1870 and 1890.

A number of bronze casts of ‘Danseuse, arabesque ouverte sur la jambe droite, bras droit à terre’ are now in international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Musée d’Orsay in Paris.