Art Institute of Chicago

Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)LinkedCulture matchlcp-bf4856169bdb

Date: c. 1860
Medium: Oil on canvas
Culture: France
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Institution: Art Institute of Chicago
Object ID: 13487

From the Art Institute of Chicago record

In 1859 Edgar Degas returned to Paris following a prolonged stay in Italy, where he visited relatives in Naples and Florence and attended life classes at the Académie Française in Rome. This picture, undertaken around 1860, speaks to his ambition to realize canvases featuring scenes from the Bible, as well as ancient and more recent history. Degas took his subject from the life of Lycurgus, a legendary ninth-century b.c. Spartan lawgiver. Lycurgus’s social reforms included an unusual method of physical training in which adolescent girls competed on an equal footing with boys, exercising nude in public. Degas would have worked up this monochromatic sketch with layers of color had he completed it, but he left it unfinished when he began a second version of the subject (National Gallery of Art, London).

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line: Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
Provenance: Artist’s studio until his death in 1917 [according to Lafond 1919]; sold at second sale of the “Atelier Degas,” Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, December 11-13, 1918, no. 7, to the artist’s brother, René de Gas [according to letter from Charles Durand-Ruel to Richard Brettell, dated May 10, 1983; copy in curatorial file]; René de Gas (died 1921); his estate, until 1927 [according to letter cited above]; sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 10, 1927, no. 76, to Durand-Ruel, Paris [according to annotated sale catalogue, Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles; copy in curatorial file]; Durand-Ruel, Paris, from 1927 to 1950; sold to Jean d’Alayer de Costemore d’Arc, Paris, 1950 [according to letter from Charles Durand-Ruel cited above. Costemore d’Arc was married to Marie-Louise Durand-Ruel]; Jean d’Alayer de Costemore d’Arc, Paris, until at least 1952 [lent by him to Amsterdam 1952]. Sam Salz, New York, by 1960; sold to the Art Institute, 1961.