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Lot Essay
Theodore Reff has confirmed the authenticity of this pastel.
Brame & Lorenceau have confirmed the authenticity of this pastel.
Degas began his celebrated series of pastels of bathing women in the early 1880s. Although the best of them have an extraordinary sense of naturalness, most of these intimate studies were executed in his studio where he had baths and basins installed with which his hired models would pose. 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 through a keyhole' (G. Adriani, Degas, Pastels, Oil sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).
Femme s'essuyant le bras belongs to an outstanding group of works executed in a number of different variants and monotypes. In his catalogue raisonné Lemoisne dated this group circa 1884, however, Theodore Reff and other authors have suggested that this group was executed after the last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886: 'It [the present pastel] is closely related to several other pastels showing the same figure in the same pose: Lemoisne 789, 790, 791, and 793, and still to others showing the image reversed, hence probably based on a counter-proof of the former: Lemoisne 794 [fig.1], 794 bis, 795 and 795 bis. All of these works can be dated to the period 1890-95' (letter dated 27 November 2004).
Degas exhibited ten pastels in the 1886 Salon des Indèpendants Impressionist Exhibition which were described as a 'sequence of female nudes bathing, washing, drying themselves, combing their hair'. These were recieved with great acclaim by an audience which marvelled at the intimisme, candour and the sensitivity of the pastel medium. Describing Degas's pastels the contemporary critic Felix Fénéon wrote: 'the skin acquired a strong, individual life of its own in M. Degas's works. His art is thoroughly realistic and is not the outcome of simple observation: as soon as a living being feels that it is being observed, it loses its natural candour. And so Degas does not work from nature: he accumulates a multiplicity of sketches about the self-same object from which his work derives an unassailable veracity; his colour is masterly in a highly personal way...his tonality now derives muted, one might say latent, effects from the reddish sheen of a strand of hair, the bluish folds of damp linen, the pink of a wrap' (Ibid., p. 84).
Femme s'essuyant le bras belonged to Henri Fèvre, Degas's nephew, and later Jean Cailac (publisher of the supplement to Loys Delteil's Pissarro print catalogue raisonné) who lent this painting to the celebrated London Royal Academy exhibition, French Art 1200-1900 in 1932. This was a key exhibition as it was the first in the Britain by any British cultural institution to include and promote Impressionism on a significant scale.
Brame & Lorenceau have confirmed the authenticity of this pastel.
Degas began his celebrated series of pastels of bathing women in the early 1880s. Although the best of them have an extraordinary sense of naturalness, most of these intimate studies were executed in his studio where he had baths and basins installed with which his hired models would pose. 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 through a keyhole' (G. Adriani, Degas, Pastels, Oil sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, p. 86).
Femme s'essuyant le bras belongs to an outstanding group of works executed in a number of different variants and monotypes. In his catalogue raisonné Lemoisne dated this group circa 1884, however, Theodore Reff and other authors have suggested that this group was executed after the last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886: 'It [the present pastel] is closely related to several other pastels showing the same figure in the same pose: Lemoisne 789, 790, 791, and 793, and still to others showing the image reversed, hence probably based on a counter-proof of the former: Lemoisne 794 [fig.1], 794 bis, 795 and 795 bis. All of these works can be dated to the period 1890-95' (letter dated 27 November 2004).
Degas exhibited ten pastels in the 1886 Salon des Indèpendants Impressionist Exhibition which were described as a 'sequence of female nudes bathing, washing, drying themselves, combing their hair'. These were recieved with great acclaim by an audience which marvelled at the intimisme, candour and the sensitivity of the pastel medium. Describing Degas's pastels the contemporary critic Felix Fénéon wrote: 'the skin acquired a strong, individual life of its own in M. Degas's works. His art is thoroughly realistic and is not the outcome of simple observation: as soon as a living being feels that it is being observed, it loses its natural candour. And so Degas does not work from nature: he accumulates a multiplicity of sketches about the self-same object from which his work derives an unassailable veracity; his colour is masterly in a highly personal way...his tonality now derives muted, one might say latent, effects from the reddish sheen of a strand of hair, the bluish folds of damp linen, the pink of a wrap' (Ibid., p. 84).
Femme s'essuyant le bras belonged to Henri Fèvre, Degas's nephew, and later Jean Cailac (publisher of the supplement to Loys Delteil's Pissarro print catalogue raisonné) who lent this painting to the celebrated London Royal Academy exhibition, French Art 1200-1900 in 1932. This was a key exhibition as it was the first in the Britain by any British cultural institution to include and promote Impressionism on a significant scale.