Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub

1885

Charcoal and pastel on light green wove paper, now discolored to warm gray, 81.3 × 56.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A woman bends double over her lower leg in a wide, shallow tub, a cloth in her hand. Degas showed it among his pastel nudes at the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886.

Her face is hidden and her body folds over the task, as if no one were watching. Impressionist painters often showed people absorbed in private, ordinary tasks like this.
Signed and dated "Degas / 85" at upper left.
Look at the tub, seen from above, nearly filling the bottom of the sheet.
Degas traded it to Mary Cassatt; it came to the Met with the Havemeyer bequest in 1929.

In the mid-1880s Degas made a series of pastels of women bathing and drying themselves. His bathers are ordinary women, not the goddesses or nymphs that usually justified a nude in art.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0