Dancer at Rest, Hand on Hips, Left Leg Forward

This small bronze is related in its form and posture to Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), originally made in wax and exhibited in 1881 with a gauze tutu, hair wig, and colored ribbons. It was the only sculptural work the artist publicly exhibited and was subsequently created in bronze in over twenty-five casts; it is also known in two plaster variants. Little Dancer's daring realism and use of unorthodox materials situate it as a lynchpin within Degas's oeuvre, and as a precursor to twentieth-century sculpture.

Oberlin's work, Dancer at Rest, while much smaller and without the costume and realistic elements of Little Dancer, is evidence of the artist's grappling with the same formal and expressive challenges that faced him in that wax sculpture. He shows a ballet "rat"-a young girl of lower-class origins-unsentimentally; she thrusts her chin, lower lip, and left leg forward and stands with both hands at her hips, in a way that could be construed as confrontational or impertinent. The Oberlin work appears somewhat more informal than Little Dancer and less like a traditional ballet pose; here too, the girl's hands are separated and not joined as they were in those of the 1881 wax.

Degas scholars have seen in Oberlin's sculpture the most convincing candidate for a "missing link" between Degas's early equestrian works and the maturity of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. As Richard Kendall has noted, the Oberlin work

has none of the sinuousness or acrobatic complexity of the waxes from later years . . . its surface shows extensive working with a toothed modeling implement of a kind used on the 1881 wax and . . . it has a distinctive anatomical vagueness around the breast, waist, and hips that would be consistent with an early trial with reduced scale clothing . . .

such as the artist was known to have made prior to 1881.