Degas' Women Bathing
From the mid 1880s Degas painted women washing, drying and combing their hair, seen at close range and absorbed in what they are doing.
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About the series
At the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, Degas showed a group of these nudes and described them in the catalogue as women bathing, washing, drying, rubbing down, combing their hair or having it combed. He said he wanted to show them as if seen through a keyhole: not posed for the viewer, simply getting on with the routine of the day.
Most of the originals are in pastel, often on several sheets joined together, with the figure cut off by the edge of a tub or a chair the way a photograph might crop it. The Tub, from 1886, a woman crouched in a shallow basin seen from above, is in the Musée d'Orsay. Combing the Hair, painted in oil around 1896 in almost nothing but reds and oranges, is in the National Gallery in London.
These are private, warm-toned pictures that suit a bedroom or a bathroom wall away from steam.
