Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas
Paris 1834-1917
51
Après Le bain, femme s’essuyant
Pastel on paper laid down on board, stamped Degas (lower left)
720 x 580 mm. (28 3 /8 x 22 7 /8 in.)
Provenance: Sale Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Atelier Edgar Degas, 1re Vente, 6t h -8 h May 1918, lot
172; Roger G. Gompel, Paris: Private Collection, France.
Exhibited: Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Degas, 1937, no. 155; Bern, Berner Kunstmuseum, Degas,
1951-52, no. 34, illustrated in the catalogue.
Literature: Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son œuvre, Paris, 1946, vol. II, no. 707, illustrated p. 403;
Robert Gordon & Andrew Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, illustrated in colour p. 247.
The wide range of rich and vibrant tones and the beautifully balanced and proportioned treatment of the
woman’s body put this amongst the finest examples from Degas’s celebrated series of bathers. Unlike his
depictions of the ballet and the races, the bather scenes were usually staged in the artist’s studio. Despite
this staging, Après le bain, femme s’essuyant recreates the
spontaneity of the act and the voyeuristic experience of
watching a woman at her toilette. Georges Jeanniot, who had
witnessed Degas at work on his pastels, reminisced about his
technique: “Degas was very concerned with the accuracy of
movements and postures. He studied them endlessly. I have
seen him work with a model, trying to make her assume
the gestures of a woman drying herself […]. You see the two
shoulderblades from behind; but the right shoulder, squeezed
by the weight of the body, assumes an unexpected outline
that suggests a kind of acrobatic gesture” 1 . Indeed, the artist
often applied his knowledge of the female body, attained
through observing dancers, to his images of bathers, and in
the present work he depicted his model with her upper body
subtly leaning to the right as she dries herself with a towel.
Though following in the steps of traditional academic study
of the nude, these works play upon the grandeur of classical
tradition with the particular immediacy of the domestic scene.
1. Edgar Degas, Study for Après le bain, femme
s’essuyant, Private Collection, Dallas.
Unlike most of his later pastels in which Degas focuses almost
entirely on the model, in the present work he broadens
the scope of the composition by depicting the woman’s
surroundings. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge wrote about
Degas’s arrangements for these compositions: “The studio
furniture that made Degas’s imaginary bedrooms was simple:
a round bath and a long one, an armchair or two, a settee, a
screen. Fabrics, heavy curtains played an important part” The
long bath, featuring in the present work, provided a dynamic
element in several depictions of bathers. “It is deep and
hollow like an architectural niche on its back. (…] There is
a moving exchange between the simple opening of the bath
and the vigorous form of the naked woman”. In the present
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