The Tub

1886

Pastel on cardboard, 60 × 83 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A woman crouches in a round tub beside a shelf of toilet articles. Shown at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, it is one of Degas's boldest bathers.

Degas looks straight down, so the shelf at right runs almost flat up the picture. The museum links this device to Japanese prints, which the Impressionists studied closely.
The Musée d'Orsay counts it as one of seven pictures of women washing from the mid-1880s.
The pose is based on the Crouching Aphrodite, an ancient statue type.
Degas had already drawn bathing women about a decade earlier, in monotypes.
Count Isaac de Camondo left it to the Louvre in 1911; it is now at the Musée d'Orsay.

Some critics of 1886 called the bathers' poses animal-like and unflattering.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain