Degas modelled the Little Dancer in sculptor's wax over a wire armature, then dressed her in fabrics rather than sculpting drapery: a cream grosgrain silk bodice with small silk-covered buttons down the front, a tutu of tulle and gauze in several layers of differing weight, and a wig, probably of horsehair, that Degas partly covered in wax to blend it into the modelled head, leaving loose strands visible at the end of the plait^[1]. The fabric slippers were likewise given a thin coat of wax to integrate them with the rest of the figure. Even now, darkened by age to the colour of mahogany, the wax retains a translucency unlike the opaque, lacquer-toned wax Degas used elsewhere in his sculpture, letting light penetrate the surface and reflect back from within, an effect largely lost in the bronze casts most museum visitors know^[1].

The model was Marie van Goethem, a Belgian-born student at the Paris Opera ballet school, one of three dancing sisters alongside Antoinette and Louise-Josephine. Degas is thought to have begun drawing her around 1878, and a sheet of studies of her face and torso in the Louvre's Cabinet des Dessins carries the inscription 36 rue de Douai, Marie, her home address, likely noted so Degas could find her again for further sittings^[1]. Her mother worked as a laundress and her father as a tailor, a background typical of the young dancers, often nicknamed rats, who filled the Opera's lower ranks. Marie later gained a certain notoriety as an artist's model in Paris in her own right, though little else about her later life was recorded in detail.

When the wax figure was shown in April 1881, critics reacted with a mixture of hostility and fascination that few other artworks of the period provoked. One hostile critic called the figure a type of horror and bestiality, suggesting it belonged in a museum of zoology rather than an art museum^[1]. Others responded very differently: the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans described an astonished public fleeing the case as if embarrassed, and praised the sculpture as at once refined and barbaric, calling it the only truly modern attempt he knew in sculpture^[1]. The critic Charles Ephrussi, while calling the figure skinny and as ugly as can be, nonetheless praised its firm, bold and shrewd execution, arguing that an ordinary artist would have turned the dancer into a puppet, where Degas had made something distinct, incisive and technically precise^[2].