Standing Female Figure with Bared Torso

This is a small picture, under 50 centimetres tall, painted in oil on paper that Degas then laid down on canvas. He made it in the late 1860s, when he was still mostly painting history scenes and formal portraits, the expected work of a young artist with academic training. A half-dressed young woman turning at her washstand was not a subject that hung at the Salon. The plain, unposed act of a woman washing and dressing is exactly what he would spend his later years on, in the pastel bathers that became some of his best-known work. Here the idea is still early and quiet. She is caught mid-movement, bare to the waist, attending to herself and paying us no notice, without the polish of a posed studio nude. On the paper support the paint sits dry and much reworked, the kind of surface Degas left on a study he made to learn from rather than to sell.