In his 1889 publication Certains, critic J.-K. Huysmans described Degas’ pastels of bathers, praising them for the: ‘unforgettable veracity of these types, captured with a deep-seated and ample draughtsmanship, with a lucid and controlled passion, as though with a cold fever; what is to be seen is the ardent and subtle colouring, the mysterious and opulent tone of these scenes; the supreme beauty of this flesh tinted pink or blue by water, illuminated by windows hung with gauze in dim rooms’ (quoted in R. Gordon & A. Forge, op. cit., p. 231). He could be describing Femme à sa toilette – the remarkable range of rich, vibrant tones and the balanced and proportioned treatment of the woman’s body mark this work out as a particularly accomplished example from the artist’s celebrated series of bathers.
Whereas Degas’ ballet dancers had all been observed in situ during rehearsals, his depictions of women à la toilette were necessarily staged in his studio. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge described the artist’s arrangements for these compositions: ‘The studio furniture that made Degas’s imaginary bedrooms was simple: a round bath and a long one, an armchair or two, a settee, a screen. Fabrics, heavy curtains played an important part’ (ibid., p. 259). In the present work, richly ornate fabrics decorate the background and Degas draws in close to his model, with the half-visible vase on the left adding an almost photographic element to this snapshot of human life. Indeed, it is this privileged view - of a moment that would normally have remained private – that makes the artist’s nudes so powerful.
‘[…] you might say that Degas’s people were more naked than nude – that he was making portraits of naked people. With his work, you always think of the individual people and their particular anatomy […]. The notion of the “nude” has in a way a self-conscious artistic feeling, and “naked” has more to do with how the people are actually made.’
Degas’s painstaking observation and exploration of the human body through different mediums (fig. 2), is apparent in the present work. His attention to physical detail and the repeated study of a single action, both honed in his depictions of dancers in the early 1880s, allow the composition to transcend the voyeurism traditionally associated with this subject matter. Although her face is hidden, Degas imparts a real sense of his model as a person, giving us a glimpse of her ordinary life. This immediacy and proximity is largely due to Degas’ choice of medium; the softness of the pastel makes it perfect for communicating flesh and it allowed the artist to work quickly, building the composition with rich layers of colour. This spontaneity of execution is also reflected in his technique of adding strips of paper to the edges of the sheet; Degas often employed this practice in his mature works, adapting the size and shape of his support to suit the emerging composition.
At the same time, the repetition of subjects provided the perfect basis for artistic experimentation. The late 1880s saw a subtle shift in Degas’ work as he began to focus on colour in a new way. As Gary Tinterow writes: ‘[…] in the bathers he pushed his interests of the mid-decade to new extremes, as if unfettered by any consideration other than the exigencies of pictorial construction. His figures are now models posing frankly in the studio, not women seen “through the keyhole” washing in their homes. Any suggestion of anecdote or humour is gone, replaced by a more profound exploration of the expressive properties of form, line, colour and feeling’ (G. Tinterow in Degas (exhibition catalogue), Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1988, p. 369).
These experiments, and particularly this focus on colour and form would continue into the 1890s. As Jean Sutherland Boggs and Anne Maheux observed: ‘From the 1880s on, Degas’s pastel technique evolved into a vocabulary of intense colour applied in a bewildering array of marks: squiggles, zigzags, striations and zébrures’ (J. Sutherland Boggs & A. Maheux, Degas Pastels, London, 1992, p. 136). In Femme à sa toilette Degas uses these techniques to achieve a profusion of colour and form that borders on the abstract, with the background rendered in blocks of patterned colour. This very decorative treatment of the background and the intimate character of the composition were highly influential to avant-garde painters over the following decades and had particular influence on the intimiste interiors of Pierre Bonnard (fig. 4).
