Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (c. 1860): Artwork and History

Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (c. 1860) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

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).

Object facts

• Title: Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys
• Date: c. 1860
• Artist attribution: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 97.4 × 140 cm (38 5/16 × 55 1/8 in.); Framed: 130.2 × 162.6 × 11.8 cm (51 1/4 × 64 × 4 5/8 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1961.334

Collection credit

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.