Bulgaria’s National Art Gallery has announced that it will present the full collection of 74 bronze sculptures by the French impressionist Edgar Degas.

The exhibition will be open September 2 in the National Art Gallery and will remain in the Bulgarian capital Sofia for two months.

The collection, owned by the US private “M.T. Abraham Center for Visual Arts”, will come to Bulgaria after its almost five-month stay in Greece.

The art critic and former head of the National Art Gallery, Boris Danailov, will be the curator of the exhibition.

According to the Bulgarian daily “Sega”, the preparation for the exhibition has taken more than a year and a half.

“The owners of the collection were given up the rights to its display to a museum in Athens and we had to negotiate with it. It took us almost two years to negotiate but as a result, we can enjoy the masterpieces of Degas,” Danailov told “Sega”.

He has also pointed out that the sculptures have been insured at a very high price and that they will be displayed under an increased security.

Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917) was born in Paris in an aristocratic family. He started studying drawing in the School of Fine Arts in Paris but dropped out in less than a year and started traveling around Europe, in order to study artists like Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian.

In 1860, he opened a studio in Paris and began painting. At first, he focused on history paintings but later turned his attention to the contemporary life.

Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance because more than half of his works depict dancers. They display his mastery in the depiction of movement.

The most expensive exhibit from the collection presented in September in the National Art Gallery in Sofia will be the sculpture “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years”, which reached a price of USD 19 M at the Sotheby’s auction house in 2009.