Das Kämmen der Haare

By the mid-1890s Degas was in his sixties and his eyesight was failing, and his late work grew broader and stranger because of it. This canvas, painted around 1896, is almost entirely red, three red pigments worked over a pale ground he left bare at the edges. A maid in her uniform combs out the hair of a seated woman who isn't yet dressed, the woman's head pulled back against the tug of the comb. Degas never finished it. The objects on the table stay half-formed, and the picture sat in his studio until he died. Two years later the painter Henri Matisse, who loved its heat, bought it for himself.