Both towels are swathed around the woman, almost like the drapery of a classical nude. The other arm reaches back awkwardly, perhaps to steady herself on the edge of the bath, perhaps to grasp the second towel on the back of the chair. She pitches forward with one arm raised to rub the towel on her neck. In this picture a woman sits beside a bath, drying her hair. His interest in the new art of photography, and how the click of the shutter captured and froze a moment of action, continued to motivate him throughout his life, especially when painting these and other subjects in motion, such as dancers at the Opera and horses racing. He wrote: ‘hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest and simple folk… It is as if you looked through a keyhole.' He might well have said ‘through a lens’ rather than a keyhole. This was a deliberate attack on tradition. Far from the classical nudes of ancient Greece and Rome that inspired his contemporary, Ingres (see, for example, Angelica rescued by Ruggiero), Degas’s nudes were real women engaged in the everyday activities of washing or bathing.
Nude woman in a bath. copy space.. series#
In the mid-1880s, Degas used these pastels for a series of nudes. Pastels in a variety of bright, ‘modern’ colours, some recent scientific creations, were available on the market, and they enabled him to draw with colour. Their matt texture resembled the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance that he admired. He became increasingly conscious that perception is a matter of choice and wrote that for him, ‘drawing isn’t a matter of what you see, it’s a question of what you can make other people see.’įor this and a number of other reasons, after 1880 Degas turned to pastels as a preferred medium. Because it was difficult for him to paint out of doors, he worked in a studio with controlled lighting, describing daylight as ‘more Monet than my eyes can stand’. Throughout his career, his approach to the creation of any picture was highly disciplined and entailed a great many preparatory studies both painted and drawn, often in charcoal.įrom at least 1870, Degas suffered from a painful eye condition that needed constant treatment, periods of rest and efforts to find new ways of working. He adhered to his early classical training: drawing as the basis for all representation. But while Impressionist artists like Monet almost abandoned line for colour, Degas was a great draughtsman. Like them, he often portrayed nineteenth-century urban French life in all its garish modernity, and from 1874 he did exhibit at Impressionist exhibitions. Edgar Degas is often referred to as an Impressionist painter, but his techniques and theories were different from theirs in several ways.
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