Woman Drying Herself

Edgar Degas was the most accomplished draftsman of the Impressionists. Woman Drying Herself depicts one of his favorite subjects: a female bather drying her hair. This masterly work of his late career, probably executed when he was around 70, was found in his studio after he died.

Degas made more than 200 charcoal and pastel drawings of female bathers, as well as substantial numbers of oil paintings, lithographs, and sculptures. This drawing, from a set of five with identical composition, is on tracing paper, which was the artist's favorite support toward the end of his life. Compared with others from the series, it is only slightly finished. Degas uses heavy charcoal lines to emphasize the woman’s unconscious, habitual movements. The undeveloped background consists of a large anthropomorphic object—perhaps a towel or a servant—and a basin to the right, above which appears a series of indistinct toiletries on a shelf. These pictures of mundane bathers are highly unconventional within their art-historical context. They participate in a genre of representation traditionally dominated by classicized and eroticized depictions of unclothed females.