Edgar Degas

Sale: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1er Vente d'Atelier Edgar Degas, 6th-8th May 1918, lot 294
Bernheim Collection, Paris
Private Collection, Germany
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1978

Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son œuvre, Paris, 1946, vol. III, no. 1290, illustrated p. 751

Executed on joined sheets of tracing paper, laid down on the artist's board. The pastel is fresh and unfaded. Apart from some small pigment losses along the diagonal line where the sheets are joined, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although the blues are slightly softer in the original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Femme à sa Toilette belongs to a group of pastels treating one of Degas' signature themes, that of a woman at her toilette. Seen from the side, the woman's upper body is twisted towards the viewer, while her head is turned the other way, as if completely unaware of the spectator's gaze. She is captured leaning over a bowl of water in the routine, calm movement of washing herself. In painting his nudes and semi-nudes, whom Degas studied so assiduously in the intimate confines of their boudoirs, the artist was interested in exploring the female body, rather than in representing his sitters as individuals. Degas rarely personified them, and concentrated instead on depicting the human form in a variety of rituals and movements. In his works on the subject of women at their toilette, the artist often depicted them in the process of washing, as in the present work, or drying various parts of their body, which allowed him to explore unusual contortions of the nude.

 

Commenting on Degas' fascination with the representation of the human body, Degas' contemporary Georges Jeanniot noted: 'Degas was very concerned with the accuracy of movements and postures. He studied them endlessly. I have seen him work with a model, trying to make her assume the gestures of a woman drying herself, tilted over the high back of a chair covered with a bath towel. This is a complicated movement. You see the two shoulderblades from behind; but the right shoulder, squeezed by the weight of the body, assumes an unexpected outline that suggests a kind of acrobatic gesture, a violent effort' (G. Jeanniot, quoted in Robert Gordon & Andrew Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 223).