Interpretive Resource

Woman at Her Toilette, c. 1900-1905
Pastel on tracing paper, 29 1/2 x 28 1/2 in. (75 x 72.5 cm)
Bequest of Mr. And Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson, 1937.1033

"Women can never forgive me," confessed Degas toward the end of his career. "They hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry." Here, Degas shows us a solitary female figure who is totally absorbed in the simple, everyday act of drying her neck after a bath. Her surroundings are plain, anonymous. A yellow-orange curtain drapes down across her hip, concealing the lower part of her body, while the red-orange fabric in the rear reinforces the richness of her long, auburn hair.

This brilliant pastel is a prime example of Degas’s later work, when he had honed down his subject matter largely to dancers and nudes using a simplified format, bold colors, and often made in series. Although certain of his colleagues, such as Monet, practiced seriality, none could match Degas’s pictorial obsessiveness. Woman at Her Toilette, for instance, has at least ten drawings closely related to it, forming a "family" of near-identical compositions that reveal the complexities, as well as the cumulative powers, of a single theme.

With roots from his early training, when he copied the Old Masters, the key ritual to later works like this pastel was drawing, tracing, and finally coloring. Visitors to Degas’s studio recalled how the master draftsman pinned sheets of tracing paper to cardboard, adding strips of paper as needed to complete his compositions. Here, the female figure, which he may have traced from another picture, occupies the largest sheet of tracing paper, with three separate sheets -- to the left, right, and on top --extending the format.

When he was satisfied with the picture, he would glue the tracing paper down -- and then add layers of expressive color. Woman at Her Toilette is the most brilliantly worked pastel in the museum’s collection. Sponged with solvents and fixatives, the layers of colors range from red-oranges to pale greens and lilacs. At different distances, the intermingled hues produce varying effects. The woman seems suspended in color, enveloped in the vortex of a whirling rainbow.

Degas’s studio was filled with scores of variations on themes like this, all propped up on easels, which he would work on in succession, tracing and extending, saving color until the end. As the poet Baudelaire contended and as Degas shows us in this late work -- "a harmoniously conducted picture consists of a series of pictures superimposed on one another, each new layer conferring greater reality on the dream." Classroom Suggestions 1. In this work of art, "Degas effectively suspended the woman in color, denying the wholeness of her form. Indeed, the figure barely survives the riot of pastel in which she exists." Have students look carefully at the color in Woman at Her Toilette. What riot of pastels did Degas create? What colors can be identified and how did the artist combine and apply them to the paper? In what setting is the woman and what color relationships exist between her and her surroundings?
br> 2. Degas often traced figures from other pictures and then added strips of paper and color to create new compositions. Have students trace figures from magazine pictures and produce their own works of art by altering the figures' poses, surroundings, and colors.

3. Have students compare Woman at her Toilette with any two other works of art. Make a list of similarities and differences, paying attention to subject matter, composition, cropping, vantage point, and color.