After a Bath. Woman Drying the Back of her Neck.

At the last of the Impressionist group shows, in 1886, Degas hung a suite of pastels of women washing and drying themselves in their own rooms. He told the Irish writer George Moore that the nude had always been posed as though an audience were present, while these women were simply occupied with their own bodies, as if you were looking through a keyhole. Several critics took the remark as an admission of something sordid, and said so in print.

He went on with the subject into the 1900s. This sheet comes from the middle of that run, made around 1895 in pastel on paper laid down on card, a woman seen from behind drying the back of her neck.

His dealer Durand-Ruel bought it in 1898 and passed it to Isaac de Camondo, a Paris banker who willed his whole collection to the Louvre and died in 1911. He attached a condition, that the works hang together under his name, so the pastel went on public view in the Camondo rooms in 1914.