When Paul-André Lemoisne, the cataloguer of Degas's work, classified this nude, he believed it was a freer study for the pastel of a figure in the same position, which is now in the Musée d'Orsay and which it is agreed was made between 1885 and 1890. Now, our assumption is that the work reproduced here is the later of these two undated nudes and that in it Degas was reflective about the past. First of all, the reclining figure with the raised arm concealing most of the features of the face can recall figures in Degas' first submission to the Salon, the Scene of War in the Middle Ages, a work that was mistakenly described in the catalogue of that Salon of 1865 as "pastel." Although this pastel nude, some thirty years later than the Scene of War, does not suggest the same kind of ravage and pain, there is a kinship in the figure's evident physical discomfort and in the mysteriousness of her surroundings.

There are also memories of his very different and realistic Suite of Nudes for the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The furnishings of that studio have survived, if less distinctly in the tin tub on the right, the towel on which the nude lies, and the armchair or chaise covered in an ochre patterned fabric, now faded. In the upper right corner lying on the carpet is a cloud of crumpled white fabric like a peignoir, and peering beyond it a pair of familiar red slippers. These seem consistent with the other reclining nude of the second half of the eighties. But here these objects are spread over a rug, woven in green and ochre, that stretches out and up to a horizon that is beyond the limits of the paper, without the limiting wall of the earlier pastel.

Everything here is somewhat faint and indistinct, the contours hard to decipher. And the background furniture and floor can, as a result, ironically remind us of the landscape background in the painting of Scene of War, flickers of orange against the slipcover of the chair like the smouldering flames in the earlier painting; the carpet around the slippers like the passages of light on the distant fields; the white towel and fallen negligee analogous to the white clouds in the medieval sky. It would not have been unnatural for Degas to have thought of the earlier work when he most unusually chose to use a reclining figure in a equally horizontal format. The romantic mood of that landscape therefore first intruded and then permeated this. Two things are significant. One is the relative lack of clarity. Contours are furry or broken, very seldom uninterrupted. The other is the activity of the strokes of pastel, restlessly asserting their graphic presence and breaking down both contours and forms in hatching, cross-hatching, parallel arcs, angular squiggles of a startling variety. Even the shadows are not permitted to remain opaque. As a result, instead of the solidity of modeling of a Caravaggio, we have the shimmering surfaces of a late Titian.
(J.S. Boggs and A. Maheux, op.cit., p. 138)

This pastel has been requested for the exhibition Degas: The Late Work, which will be held at the National Gallery, London (May-Aug., 1996) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Sept., 1996-Jan., 1997).