Morning Toilet

This was still in Degas's studio when he died in September 1917. The following May the studio contents were auctioned over three days at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, while German long-range guns were shelling the city. Buyers came anyway. The canvas went out through the dealer Ambroise Vollard, and then through Walther Halvorsen, a Norwegian painter turned dealer who was buying in Paris for a neutral country where French art had suddenly found a market. Halvorsen staged a large French exhibition in Kristiania in 1918, and in 1919 the Friends of the National Gallery bought this picture and gave it to the museum. Degas had painted it in the early 1890s. A woman sits on the edge of an unmade bed in her nightgown while another gathers up her long red hair, the contours rubbed away and the brushwork left standing.