The female bather was a subject with which Degas was obsessively preoccupied throughout the last three decades of his life. At the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition of 1886, he first exhibited a set of pastels with the collective title "Sequence of nudes of Women Bathing, Washing, Drying, Wiping themselves, Combing their hair or Having it Combed". Thereafter this theme offered him undiminishing scope for pictorial expression. Le Petit Déjeuner après le Bain shows a nude woman stepping out of her bath in the early morning, her maid waiting to attend her. The position is active and unstable, but despite this informality the overall composition is carefully organized. Each composition only coalesced after a period of deep contemplation, precise observation being combined with imaginative experimentation. This is true particularly of the 1890s when Degas prefers a strong formal arrangement, the vibrancy of the drawing and the resonance of the colour bringing the subject to life.

It is worth remembering that Degas, like Monet, was working in series. As Brettell notes that, "Claude Monet was working throughout the 1890s on pictures about time and light as they play on form. Degas, always the humanist, even if a cynical one, dealt with time in the motion of the human figure. Here, as light shifts over the scumbled pastels, creating reflections on the shiny skin of the figure, the morning is embodied" (R. Brettell, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York, 1984, p. 162).