J.-K. Huysmans, the most brilliant and penetrating art critic of Degas’s time, recognized Degas’s revolutionary achievement and called his statue of The Little Dancer “the only really modern attempt that I know in sculpture. . . . All the ideas about sculpture, about cold, lifeless whiteness, about those memorable formulas copied again and again for centuries, are demolished. . . . M. Degas has knocked over the traditions of sculpture, just as he has for a long time been shaking up the conventions of painting.”

Sculpture sustained Degas’s hopes and helped keep him alive. As early as 1870, when he was thirty-six, Degas lost the sight of his right eye. For the rest of his long life he suffered from myopia, an irregular field of vision, and an intolerance of bright light, and he was threatened with blindness, which finally extinguished his artistic career. In 1873 he fatalistically exclaimed: “I shall remain in the ranks of the infirm until I pass into the ranks of the blind.” Five years later a friend lamented that Degas “spends hours in a dark and desperate mood, matching the gravity of his condition.” By 1884 Degas was “often tempted to give it up and to go to sleep forever”—to close his eyes, accept darkness, and wait for death. A decade later, doctors tried to improve his ever-failing sight by covering his right eye and allowing the left one to see through a slit in his spectacles. By 1906 he could see only