Nach dem Bade, sich abtrocknende Frau

In the last decades of the 19th century the private bathroom was becoming a fixture of middle-class Paris homes, and Degas built a whole series around it, women washing, drying, combing their hair, as if the viewer had just walked in on them. This one, worked in pastel, shows a woman hunched on the edge of the tub, rubbing a towel against the back of her neck. He layered the chalk again and again until the body looks almost rubbed into the paper. His eyesight was failing in these years, which drew him toward pastel and its strong, direct colour. Critics of the time complained that he painted women as if watched through a keyhole.