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Lot Essay
In the last two decades of Edgar Degas' career, his depictions of bathers were among his favorite subjects, second only in frequency to his studies of dancers. Both series enabled the artist to evoke the expressiveness of the human figure and specifically to render the female body in a variety of poses and environments, from public performances on stage to private moments after the bath.
The present pastel portrays a pose that is frequently seen in Degas' oeuvre. The woman arches her back as she bends to dry the nape of her neck. This figure appears in several pastels of this period, including Femme à sa toilette (Lemoisne 1426) The Art Institute of Chicago), for which the present work might be a study or even a later version. Degas seems to have originated this pose thirty years earlier in the oil painting Femme se coiffant (Lemoisne 642); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), and several elements of the composition appear in the artist's monotypes of the late 1870s. This motif was well established by the 1890s, as is evident in Degas' lithographs. Familiar too are many of the props around the bather's figure: the low armchair upholstered in yellow ochre, the porcelain washstand and the substantial bathtowel, some of which are obscured by passages of aggressive orange strokes.
In an important sense, Degas' images like Après le bain evolved from one of the most established themes in the nineteenth century. The motif of the nude female depicted from behind has an extended and significant lineage in nineteenth-century French art. As Richard Thomson has asserted, this pose shows clear evidence of Degas' revived historicism, linking him both to his teacher Jean-Dominique Ingres, whose paradigmatic image of the La baigneuse Valpinçon (Musée du Louvre, Paris) he copied in his youth and praised throughout his career, to Ingres' predecessor Eugène Delacroix, who featured the motif in paintings like L'entrée des croisés à Constantinople (Musée du Louvre, Paris). In many ways, however, the present pastel reveals Degas' innovations in both subject matter and style: Degas removed the nude from the rarified realm of exoticism and myth and placed her in a clearly modern setting at the same time that he demonstrated his ingenious manipulation of the pastel medium.
The theme of the woman at her bath appealed to the artist as both an opportunity to engage in methodical studies of an individual subject and an occasion to present distinctly modern women in domestic environments. The majority of these studies were done in the studio where the artist installed baths and basins with which his models would pose, but the best of the pastels, such as the present work, have an extraordinary sense of spontaneity, a quality that was immediately singled out by contemporary critics who praised the artist's representations of the modern woman, even in such intimate environments. Even a celebrated statement by the artist insinuates the modern viewer, quite literally, into the modern domestic interior. As Degas once told a visitor, "Until now the nude has always been presented in poses which assume the presence of an audience, but these women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition . . . it is as though one were watching them through a keyhole" (G. Adriani, Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).
The present pastel portrays a pose that is frequently seen in Degas' oeuvre. The woman arches her back as she bends to dry the nape of her neck. This figure appears in several pastels of this period, including Femme à sa toilette (Lemoisne 1426) The Art Institute of Chicago), for which the present work might be a study or even a later version. Degas seems to have originated this pose thirty years earlier in the oil painting Femme se coiffant (Lemoisne 642); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), and several elements of the composition appear in the artist's monotypes of the late 1870s. This motif was well established by the 1890s, as is evident in Degas' lithographs. Familiar too are many of the props around the bather's figure: the low armchair upholstered in yellow ochre, the porcelain washstand and the substantial bathtowel, some of which are obscured by passages of aggressive orange strokes.
In an important sense, Degas' images like Après le bain evolved from one of the most established themes in the nineteenth century. The motif of the nude female depicted from behind has an extended and significant lineage in nineteenth-century French art. As Richard Thomson has asserted, this pose shows clear evidence of Degas' revived historicism, linking him both to his teacher Jean-Dominique Ingres, whose paradigmatic image of the La baigneuse Valpinçon (Musée du Louvre, Paris) he copied in his youth and praised throughout his career, to Ingres' predecessor Eugène Delacroix, who featured the motif in paintings like L'entrée des croisés à Constantinople (Musée du Louvre, Paris). In many ways, however, the present pastel reveals Degas' innovations in both subject matter and style: Degas removed the nude from the rarified realm of exoticism and myth and placed her in a clearly modern setting at the same time that he demonstrated his ingenious manipulation of the pastel medium.
The theme of the woman at her bath appealed to the artist as both an opportunity to engage in methodical studies of an individual subject and an occasion to present distinctly modern women in domestic environments. The majority of these studies were done in the studio where the artist installed baths and basins with which his models would pose, but the best of the pastels, such as the present work, have an extraordinary sense of spontaneity, a quality that was immediately singled out by contemporary critics who praised the artist's representations of the modern woman, even in such intimate environments. Even a celebrated statement by the artist insinuates the modern viewer, quite literally, into the modern domestic interior. As Degas once told a visitor, "Until now the nude has always been presented in poses which assume the presence of an audience, but these women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition . . . it is as though one were watching them through a keyhole" (G. Adriani, Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).