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Lot Essay
Executed circa 1887, Edgar Degas’s Femme s’épongeant le dos offers an intimate depiction of a young nude woman in a tub, quietly and wholly absorbed in the ritualistic daily acts of bathing. The impressive scale and powerful rendering of this female figure dates from a period in which the subject of the bather became an increasingly dominant focus within the artist’s oeuvre. Fusing tradition with innovation, his scenes of the female nude à sa toilette were deemed scandalous by many contemporary viewers. While painting a bather as the mythical Diana or the biblical Susanna was de rigueur in the official Salon, as Degas remarked to his dealer Ambroise Vollard, ‘a woman undressing, never!’ (quoted in A. Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait, New York, 1937, p. 48). Freed from literary, historic or mythological associations and separated from an easily legible societal context, Degas’s bathers thus presented a radically modern vision of the female body.
Though Degas claimed that these pictures of bathers gave the impression of having been glimpsed through a keyhole, the artist was more than willing to confess that his paintings, pastels and drawings devoted to the subject were in fact an act of deliberate artifice, created using models who posed for hours in his prop-filled studio. For Degas, an artist obsessed with the human form and particularly the figure in movement, a woman bathing offered a wealth of inspiration and variety, the range of seemingly instinctive, naturalistic poses she adopted in the process of carrying out her daily ablutions appearing entirely unpremeditated and spontaneous. Around this time he began working in series, basing clusters of compositions on a single pose that captivated his imagination, varying certain elements from one version to the next. While early stages of the pose used in the present drawing may be seen in two quickly executed charcoal studies (Atelier Degas; 3ème vente, lots 207 and 244), it appears to be most closely connected to the pastel, Le bain, femme s’épongeant le dos, ascribed to the same date (Lemoisne no. 915).
There is an intense realism to the pose in Femme s’épongeant le dos, as the standing woman bends forward, her body contracting and curving inwards on itself as she places one hand on the side of the tub to steady herself, the other reaching behind to wash her back. While there is a sense of physical strain, Degas has carefully balanced his figure in a classical contrapposto stance, her weight naturally settling to one side as she twists slightly to her left. The sheet is filled with vigorous strokes of charcoal, combining staccato dashes with fluid elongated lines, dynamic zig-zagging marks and passages of smudged, blended pigment. Subtle pentimenti reveal how Degas’s thinking shifted as he worked, leading him to make alterations to her contours, most noticeably in the lines of her limbs and the repeated reworking of the fingers of her right hand as they grip a sponge. Amid the intricate network of charcoal marks, this sponge is highlighted by the artist with a pop of colour, its soft, malleable form lightly delineated along one edge with a touch of yellow pastel.
Though Degas claimed that these pictures of bathers gave the impression of having been glimpsed through a keyhole, the artist was more than willing to confess that his paintings, pastels and drawings devoted to the subject were in fact an act of deliberate artifice, created using models who posed for hours in his prop-filled studio. For Degas, an artist obsessed with the human form and particularly the figure in movement, a woman bathing offered a wealth of inspiration and variety, the range of seemingly instinctive, naturalistic poses she adopted in the process of carrying out her daily ablutions appearing entirely unpremeditated and spontaneous. Around this time he began working in series, basing clusters of compositions on a single pose that captivated his imagination, varying certain elements from one version to the next. While early stages of the pose used in the present drawing may be seen in two quickly executed charcoal studies (Atelier Degas; 3ème vente, lots 207 and 244), it appears to be most closely connected to the pastel, Le bain, femme s’épongeant le dos, ascribed to the same date (Lemoisne no. 915).
There is an intense realism to the pose in Femme s’épongeant le dos, as the standing woman bends forward, her body contracting and curving inwards on itself as she places one hand on the side of the tub to steady herself, the other reaching behind to wash her back. While there is a sense of physical strain, Degas has carefully balanced his figure in a classical contrapposto stance, her weight naturally settling to one side as she twists slightly to her left. The sheet is filled with vigorous strokes of charcoal, combining staccato dashes with fluid elongated lines, dynamic zig-zagging marks and passages of smudged, blended pigment. Subtle pentimenti reveal how Degas’s thinking shifted as he worked, leading him to make alterations to her contours, most noticeably in the lines of her limbs and the repeated reworking of the fingers of her right hand as they grip a sponge. Amid the intricate network of charcoal marks, this sponge is highlighted by the artist with a pop of colour, its soft, malleable form lightly delineated along one edge with a touch of yellow pastel.