Interpretive Resource

Breakfast after the Bath exemplifies the astonishing vigor, complexity, and richness of Edgar Degas’s late pastels, many of which—including this sheet—were seen by no one until 1918, a year after the artist’s death, when thousands of works that remained in his studio were auctioned.

Degas made this drawing in the last years of the nineteenth century. His eyesight was failing and he had no patience with the art world, but he continued to explore, almost compulsively, his favorite themes, one of which was the female toilette. Probably tracing earlier drawings and studying his own wax sculptures, rather than sketching from a live model, Degas here depicted a forceful nude in the act of climbing out of a tub. The scene is frozen at the moment immediately preceding the bather’s acknowledgment of her maid, who approaches carefully bearing a breakfast tray. Chromatic zones—the unmodulated yellow of the dressing gown draped over a chair, the red-and-pink fabric at the lower right, the maid’s blue dress—surround the central figure. The artist’s total concentration on the woman’s movement is reflected in the sketchiness of her surroundings, which he indicated with bold, gestural notations.

Breakfast after the Bath is certainly an intimate image, but, at three feet tall, it is not small in scale. The human figure, as always in Degas’s work, retains a monumental aspect. In his late pastels, Degas brought to bear his formidable knowledge of past and present art, aspiring to the formal integrity of the Old Masters while also achieving the decorative harmony of his younger colleagues, the Nabis.