Provides a simple introduction to French artist Edgar Degas and his pastel paintings of ballerinas.

In the City of Lights, at the dawn of a new age, begins an unforgettable story of great love, great art—and the most painful choices of the heart. With this fresh and vibrantly imagined portrait of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, readers are transported through the eyes of a young Parisian ballerina to an era of light and movement. An ambitious and enterprising farm girl, Alexandrie joins the prestigious Paris Opera ballet with hopes of securing not only her place in society but her family’s financial future. Her plan is soon derailed, however, when she falls in love with the enigmatic artist whose paintings of the offstage lives of the ballerinas scandalized society and revolutionized the art world. As Alexandrie is drawn deeper into Degas’s art and Paris’s secrets, will she risk everything for her dreams of love and of becoming the ballet’s star dancer?

Edgar Degas (18341917) is best known for his luminous studies of dancers. Illustrated with drawings, pastels, paintings, prints and sculpture, as well as photographs taken by the artist and his contemporaries, and samples of film from the period, this text follows the development of Degas's ballet imagery.

Enchanting markers include details from 12 of the famed French artist's finest paintings, among them Dancer at the Bar; Frieze of Dancers; Dancer with Bouquet, Curtseying, and 9 others.

Marie dreams of becoming the most famous ballerina in the world. When she joins the ballet school in Paris, she notices a fierce man sitting at the side, sketching the dancers. The man is the painter, Edgar Degas, and his clay model of Marie does indeed make her the most famous dancer of all.

The life, dreams, and struggles of the fourteen-year-old dancer who posed for Degas's most famous sculpture

This absorbing, heartfelt work uncovers the story of the real dancer behind Degas’s now-iconic sculpture, shedding light on the struggles of late nineteenth-century Parisian life. She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? We know only her age, fourteen, and the work that she did—because it was already grueling work, at an age when children today are sent to school. In the 1880s, she danced as a “little rat” at the Paris Opera, and what is often a dream for young girls now wasn’t a dream for her. She was fired after several years of intense labor; the director had had enough of her repeated absences. She had been working another job, even two, because the few pennies the Opera paid weren’t enough to keep her and her family fed. She was a model, posing for painters or sculptors—among them Edgar Degas. Drawing on a wealth of historical material as well as her own love of ballet and personal experiences of loss, Camille Laurens presents a compelling, compassionate portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited that shows the importance of those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art.