Interpretive Resource

In the last phase of his career, Edgar Degas treated the theme of the female bather in all media, including sculpture. This charming work, cast in bronze after Degas’s death, is a particularly appealing, even playful, variation on that subject. In a round basin partially filled with water, a young woman relaxes and absently plays with the toes of her left foot.

Degas’s original wax version of The Tub (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) is one of his greatest, most original technical achievements. He molded the figure out of red-brown beeswax, placed it in an ordinary metal basin, surrounded it with "water" made of plaster-soaked rags, and placed a real sponge in its left hand. X-rays have revealed that the work’s ingredients also include cork, wood, wire, and a lead-alloy strip.

The Tub is innovative in another, more subtle way. The female nude is of course a central subject in the history of Western art, associated with many conventions and traditions. However, unlike so many of his predecessors and more conservative contemporaries, Degas did not depict his adolescent bather in the guise of a nymph or goddess, nor did he imbue her features and gestures with eroticism. Instead, she is self-absorbed, modest, and engaged in a mundane activity. In this small piece—it measures only some twenty inches across—Degas explored a state of privacy, intimacy, and even vulnerability.