About this work
At the centre of *The Toilet* is an intimate scene of a woman during her toilette — a moment of personal care and grooming. Her body is bent over a basin, back towards the viewer, absorbed entirely in the act of washing.
The pastel medium allows for a subtle interplay of colours, building soft textures and gentle gradients that evoke warmth and immediacy — the naturalistic tones of human skin set against the cooler blues and greens of the basin and its surroundings.
Trained in the tradition of neo-classicist Jean-Auguste Ingres, who famously celebrated the female back as a site of sensual expression, Degas, too, had used the back as a locus of character since the 1870s — in women walking, in jockeys, in dancers waiting in the wings. Here, that compositional instinct reaches one of its quietest and most resolved expressions: a figure at once completely ordinary and quietly monumental.
Executed in pastel in 1897, *The Toilet* belongs to the Impressionist movement — a nearly square composition measuring 60 by 61 centimetres.
It was in May 1886, at the eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition, that Degas had first unveiled a series of pastels of nude women bathing, washing, and combing their hair — works that were the talk of the show, criticised for their ungainly poses by some and praised for their radical honesty by others. They were not idealised images but pictures of the modern woman going about her daily ablutions.
Over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, Degas gradually abandoned the modern-life scenarios that had made his reputation to focus almost exclusively on the sight of the female figure.
Despite the ordinariness of the models and the mundane bathroom activities, Degas succeeded in giving his bathers a certain majesty — and by 1897, with his eyesight beginning to fail, the muted colour schemes of earlier years gave way to a more intense palette of lush greens, deep violets, and flashes of ultramarine.
This is a work for rooms that can hold a mood — a study, a bedroom, a bathroom with considered light. It suits warm, neutral interiors where the softness of the pastel palette can breathe, and it rewards slow looking rather than a glance. The figure exists in her own world, totally oblivious to being watched — and that quality of absolute privacy is precisely what draws you in. The female form here is more iconic than individual; by stripping his subject of specifics, Degas used the back as a locus for the body's expressive powers and poetic centre.
