Marie van goethem biography channel

“Why do you say that de Gas [sic] can’t get hard?” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his friend, artist Émile Bernard, in 1888. “De Gas lives like a little law clerk and doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them often, he would become deranged and inept at painting.”

In the letter, the “Starry Night” painter was referring to the French impressionist Edgar Degas, who famously depicted 19th-century ballerinas in moments between grand jetés and pirouettes, stretching and resting and adjusting leotards on canvases that today hang in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The National Gallery in London and many, many other museums.

Less famously, he was a celibate misogynist who saw women as “‘human animals,’ females of the species.”

So explains author Camille Laurens in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a new book on the life of Degas’ most easily recognizable subject, whose name ― Marie van Goethem ― is nowhere near as iconic as