Young Spartans Exercising

The girls reach and gesture towards the boys across a small gap. Some figures lean forward, while others hold back. The encounter looks competitive, but it may also contain the beginnings of courtship. Edgar Degas, a French painter later known for contemporary dancers and performers, began this ancient subject around 1860. He drew on the writer Plutarch’s account of Sparta, where girls exercised and challenged boys. The scene let him explore a group of young bodies through contrasting poses. Adults gather in the middle distance around the lawgiver Lycurgus. The open landscape gives the foreground groups a stage, but their faces do not all follow an ideal classical type. Degas revised the painting to bring more contemporary features into it. He kept the work in his studio throughout his life and returned to it long after beginning it. Look at the different responses within each group rather than searching for one decisive action. The interest lies in a meeting still taking shape.