Woman Combing her Hair

Degas never sold this pastel. It stayed in his studio until his death in 1917 and first came on the market in May 1918, at the first of the sales that emptied that studio, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris while the First World War was still being fought. It went to Georges Viau, a Paris dentist who collected the Impressionists. Viau's own collection was sold at the Hôtel Drouot on 11 December 1942, in occupied Paris, and the national museums bought this sheet there for the Louvre. The picture itself belongs to the late 1880s, when Degas kept returning to women washing, drying and combing their hair in private rooms. Here a seated woman in a white wrap draws a comb through her long red hair. In 1945 the Louvre showed it among the museums' acquisitions of the war years.