About this work
A woman is caught in the unhurried act of combing her hair — her back to us, her body slightly twisted as her arms reach upward.
Her nude figure is rendered with a softness of form and a delicate handling of light and shadow that feels less posed than simply *observed*. The background offers a harmonious blend of greens and blues, providing a striking contrast to the figure's warm skin tones. But the palette is far from naturalistic: Degas emphasized anti-natural chartreuses and greens in modeling the figure's pink flesh, perhaps inspired by the play of complementary color contrasts in the work of such younger contemporaries as Seurat or Van Gogh. The result is a work that feels simultaneously domestic and electric — a body in motion, rendered in colour that hums.
This is the second of two variants of a composition that Degas created about 1885, the first being held at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
In this version, he pushed his technique further, applying pastel in so many successive layers that the pigment became burnished and the underlying paper rubbed to such an extent that the fibers were loosened and now project from the surface like many little hairs — an uncanny material echo of the subject itself. Degas, in the classic line of descent from Ingres as a draughtsman, exchanged oil paint for pastel with a sense of greater freedom — able to draw in the medium as well as apply colour. The work belongs to his series of *femmes à leur toilette*, scenes in which the artist returned again and again to the theme of women combing their hair — capitalizing on the chance it provided to portray a figure absorbed in her task, seemingly unaware she is being observed.
This is a work for a room that earns its quiet. It suits a space with natural light and enough wall to let the figure breathe — a bedroom, a reading room, or a softly lit hallway where you pass it daily and notice something different each time. The pastel creates a texture that seems both soft and dynamic, inviting the viewer to engage with the sensuousness of the subject matter as well as the materiality of the medium itself — the composition evoking an intimate and unguarded moment. It speaks to collectors drawn to art that rewards slow looking: the longer you stand with it, the more the colour relationships reveal themselves, and the more the figure seems to shift and breathe.
