About this work
A woman steps awkwardly from a tub, her body caught mid-motion in an act she never expected anyone to witness. The viewer's position is that of a voyeur — placed behind a chair in the room's foreground, peering past it into the domestic interior.
A steeply tilted picture plane creates an abrupt transition to the background, divided into a framework of dark and light vertical sections, while a patterned carpet contributes to a deliberate flattening of the scene. The result is a composition held in productive tension between observation and abstraction — solidly human at its center, almost architectural at its edges. The work, held in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was executed around 1879–1880 in a combination of electric crayon, etching, drypoint, and aquatint.
The print originated in an evening Degas spent at the home of Alexis Rouart — and he made it using a carbon rod, an element of early electric lamps he likely sourced from the Rouart factory on the premises.
He then continued revising the image relentlessly, producing at least twenty-two variations, more states than he made for any other print. This obsessive reworking places *Leaving the Bath* squarely within one of the most consequential phases of Degas's career. By 1886, he would exhibit a suite of pastel nudes at the final Impressionist Exhibition — images that were the talk of the show, with some viewers criticizing the ungainly poses and others praising their unflinching honesty as depictions of the modern woman in daily life.
Far from the classical nudes of antiquity, Degas depicted real women engaged in the everyday act of washing — a deliberate attack on tradition.
Following the reopening of trade with Japan, Degas drew on Japanese prints not for their imagery but for their inventive compositions and points of view, particularly in his use of cropping and asymmetry — both of which are on full display here.
This is a work for a space that can hold a quiet argument. It belongs in a room with considered light — a study, a reading corner, a bedroom where art is looked at rather than displayed. The viewer it rewards is one who notices what's missing from the center of a composition, who understands that cropping and angle are never neutral. Degas captured intimate moments with great precision, choosing not to over-sexualize his subjects — a quality that curator Richard Kendall found particularly significant, suggesting the figures were meant to exist "in a world of their own." Hung where
