Después del baño (Mujer secándose)

Around 1896 Degas was spending his evenings with a camera. He had taken up photography the year before, posing friends and models under lamplight for long exposures, and among the pictures he made were nudes drying themselves after a bath, the same motif he had been working at in pastel for a decade. This is one of the rare late versions in oil, and a large one, over a metre wide. By then the argument about these bathers was old news. When he showed a suite of them in 1886, reviewers wrote about looking through a keyhole. His sight was failing through these years, and he turned more and more to pastel and to modelling figures in wax, work he could do close to the hand.