After the Bath - Woman Drying Herself

Her body awkwardly contorted in the act of towelling herself after a bath, the naked woman in this vibrant pastel seems to be caught unawares in a private moment. Such intimate scenes increasingly occupied Edgar Degas in the later decades of his career. As is typical of his pastels, the medium is applied in distinct layers, with little blending, over a charcoal underdrawing. This method, unique to Degas, creates marvellous drifts of colour and unusual linear rhythms, blurring the boundary between drawing and painting.

In 1886, at the last Impressionist exhibition, Degas exhibited a remarkable group of pastels of intimate views of women bathing, reaching for a sponge or towel, stepping in or out of their bath, dressing, brushing and combing their hair. Though contemporary opinion was divided, with some critics and fellow artists criticising their obscenity, crudeness and lack of aesthetic value, these pastels were equally praised for their new and realistic representation of the female nude. Degas admitted to having represented women in a voyeuristic manner, observing them in the most private moments as if through a keyhole. Some critics particularly objected to the fact that most of these works appeared to represent prostitutes and their attendants. However, these extraordinary pastels were greatly appreciated by collectors then and since, and certainly were one of Degas’s most fertile artistic obsessions. Female bathers first appeared in Degas’s monotypes around 1880 (The flexibility and malleability of this medium suited his hunger for unbridled experimentation, and allowed him to study and ‘synthesise the body and its movements that influenced the way he drew’. He reworked some of these monotypes, heightening them in pastel and radically transforming the original image; some of these compositions inspired new, fully worked pastels. Between the early 1880s and the end of his career he produced roughly 200 pastels of female bathers. In sheer numbers, the subject occupies the second largest place in his oeuvre, preceded only by dance. The present work was probably executed in the last years of the nineteenth century. In this lavish pastel, dominated by a warm coral-orange tonality, the female figure is depicted alone, seated on a low upholstered chair by a deep bathtub, with her feet resting on a rug. She is drying the left side of her body; her head, partially hidden by the raised arm, is bent while she carefully performs her action. Liberated from the formal canon of classical academic training, Degas often represented women in unusually contorted positions. In these close-up views of faceless, naked bodies in undistinguished, contemporary interiors with simple elements such as a bath or tub, the artist aspired to represent the modern female nude. The sensual submissiveness of these figures, which recalls Old Master representations of Susanna and the Elders or Bathsheba at her Bath, has also led to a feminist reading of this body of work, which views these figures as depicted purely for the pleasure of the (male) observer. As in many of Degas’s late pastels of female nudes, the composition of After the Bath is the result of several studies made over the course of an extended period of contemplation and observation, allowing us to witness the gestation of the original idea. Nine related drawings, mostly in charcoal, and a counterproof exist and were included with the present pastel in the sales of the contents of his studio that were organised after his death. Four other variants in pastel elaborate on the composition with only minor changes. Degas also explored the woman’s pose in a small wax sculpture, part of the group found in his studio at his death. Unsigned and undated, After the Bath displays an extraordinarily wide variety of rich, warm hues, typical of his late pastels, and also exhibits theunfinished quality of those works. In the upper right corner, for example, there is very little medium and the surface of the paper is laid bare; a sketchy design in charcoal indicates the shape of an object left incomplete. The pastel is mostly applied in individual strokes over a preparatory drawing in charcoal, and is used without rubbing even when it serves to modulate a tone. To define the figure’s skin, Degas added rhythmic lines of white, green, red and purple over a pink flesh tone. The application is instinctive and spontaneous, especially in the areas covered by webs of parallel lines, cross-hatching, squiggles and energetic zigzags. With the exception of the figure’s right arm and the white towel, there is very little blending. Towards the end of his life, pastel became Degas’s preferred medium as he found it easier to work with than oil; he seems to have favoured ready-made pastel sticks, in particular those produced by Henri Roché. According to Paul-André Lemoisne’s catalogue raisonné, after 1886 Degas produced 600 pictures, of which only 80 were oil paintings and the remainder were pastels. The role played by this medium neatly distinguishes him from most of his Impressionist colleagues, who often took up pastel at some point during their careers, but for whom this powdery medium never held so central a place in their oeuvre. If the choice of pastel was a natural one in his later years, owing to its ease of handling and quickness of execution, Degas’s use of tracing paper as its main support is less intuitive and is only explained by his characteristically experimental working process. In the 1880s, the artist began to use tracing paper frequently to transfer a design, mainly in charcoal, from one support to another, recommending the practice to his fellow artists: ‘Make a drawing, begin it again, trace it; begin it again, and re-trace it’. The transparency of tracing paper allowed him easily to copy a figure or composition from one sheet to another, reversing it whenever necessary, in a drive to achieve the desired posture or layout. For some of his large compositions, often more than half-a-dozen preparatory drawings on tracing paper exist, all minutely different from one another. The figure in this drawing is most likely traced from another sheet. In Degas’s late pastels, the tracing-paper support is often altered by trimming or extending with added strips of paper, visible for examplealong the lower edge of the present work. Because these extensions were mostly added after he had begun work on the main section of the drawing, the overlapping areas where the sheets join are clearly visible, and Degas made little effort to mask them before they were laid down on a more solid support. The extremely smooth surface of tracing paper is not naturally suited to pastel’s powdery, volatile nature and traditionally artists preferred a more textured paper to which the fine particles of pastel would adhere. In order to prevent the loss of medium, Degas applied multiple layers of fixative. This also prevented the merging of hues, while sealing each preceding stage of the drawing. Indeed, Walter Sickert recalled seeing a pastel by Degas which he had ‘fixed and refixed … with a ball syringe’. The practice of fixing each layer of pastel created marvellous drifts of colours and graphic eruptions, as well as areas of impasto-like appearance, which have become the defining feature of Degas’s unparalleled pastel technique and offer powerful visual proof of his unique drive for experimentation. [From the exhibition catalogue: The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, 2019]

Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill (1898-1956); purchased from him by Percy Moore Turner of the Independent Gallery (London), 1 November 1927 (£600); purchased there by Samuel Courtauld, London (1876-1947), 16 December 1927 (£1,800); Courtauld Gift 1932

The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, 20/02/2019-17/06/2019

Degas and the Nude, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 09/10/2011-29/01/2012

Into the 20th century - New Displays at the Courtauld, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 10/10/2002 ...More

Salmon, Dimitri, Percy Moore Turner, Précieux Conseiller de Samuel and Elizabeth Courtauld, Fondation Louis Vuitton 2019
pp. 33, 34n159, no. 35 on p. 75
Ill. no. 35, p. 75; ill. 29 (unpag.)

Serres, Karen (ed.), The Courtauld Collection: A Vision for Impressionism, Paul Holberton Publishing 2019
no. 14, pp. 130-35
Ill. p. 131

Salmon, Dimitri, et al., Le Saint Joseph Charpentier de Georges de la Tour: un don au Louvre de Percy Moore Turner, Paris 2017
pp. 405 and 432n486 ...More

Inscription: inscription : stamped : bottom left & recto : mark of Degas's studio sale :