About this work
*Le Tub* (1886) is a pastel on cardboard measuring 60 × 83 cm, depicting a nude woman in the act of bathing, captured from an elevated, plunging perspective that emphasizes the everyday intimacy of the scene.
Supporting herself with her left hand and raising a sponge to her neck with her right, the figure crouches inside a circular zinc tub. The viewer never sees her face — only the curve of her spine, the weight of her shoulders, the tilt of concentration. The figure is illuminated by a soft, cool morning light that fills the chamber with a bluish glow, while Degas's pastel lines draw the eye to the green, yellow, and red threads of the rug, the streaks of blue and orange in the reflective surface of the shallow water, and the dense white texture of the towel.
The severity of the composition's hard vertical edge — the side of a dresser — is tempered by a still-life arrangement atop it: two jugs, a wig, curling tongs, and a hairbrush, whose colors and shapes echo the body's rhythms.
Although the surface is built from fine, delicate strokes, Degas abandons the traditional academic role of line as fixed contour, instead constructing form through chromatic hatching and textured color zones.
*The Tub* is one of a series of seven pictures produced by Degas in the mid-1880s on the theme of women at their ablutions, a subject he had already explored in a series of monotypes some ten years previously.
The last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, was a turning point in Degas's career, and here he presented new works including a "suite of female nudes, bathing, washing, drying themselves, wiping themselves, combing their hair or having their hair combed," which included *The Tub*.
Degas rejected the idealized treatment of the nude favored by many of his contemporaries, who depicted mythological or literary figures in accordance with academic convention — and it was precisely this break from convention that led some critics to accuse him of voyeurism, though what others interpreted as shamelessness was, for Degas, a commitment to unembellished truth.
He drew inspiration from classical sculptures like the Crouching Aphrodite, adapting the pose to a modern, unidealized female figure engaged in routine self-care.
From about 1890 onward, Degas's nudes grew popular among collectors and exerted a marked influence on other artists — Paul Gauguin echoed their poses in his depictions of Tahitian women, Vincent van Gogh admired them openly, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec adapted their compositional strategies in his own work.
*The Tub*
