Women at Their Toilette

The museum gives this picture two titles, Women at Their Toilette and The Gynaeceum, the ancient Greek word for the part of a house kept for women. Vallotton's version, from 1897, is a cluttered Paris room. One woman stands in a shallow grey metal basin, rubbing her hair with a white towel. Another sits folded forward on a red sofa, a third raises her arms to her hair before a tall standing mirror, and a maid in black with a white cap holds a garment ready. The floor is a clash of patterned rugs, with a pair of red slippers kicked off and a yellow sponge lying in the basin. Degas had already shown a series of pastels of bathers in shallow tubs in Paris in 1886. Vallotton's scene is a small painting on cardboard, which the Musée d'Orsay bought in 2011.