About this work
is an intimate work from around 1875–76 in which Degas presents three views of a young woman combing her hair — standing with her long tresses hanging down the right side of her body, seated on a chair with her hair thrown over her head, and sitting on the ground combing it over to the left.
Barefoot and dressed in a chemise, she seems to move freely about her dressing room, though Degas completed the image by placing her within a landscape setting — a pure invention. Executed in oil on paper mounted on canvas, the work measures just under 13 × 18 inches, giving it the quality of a swift, unguarded note — intimate in scale, but wholly resolved in vision.
For Degas, whose mature oeuvre dates from the 1860s to around 1900, *Women Combing Their Hair* is a relatively early work and represents one of the first manifestations of a subject that would occupy him throughout his entire career, culminating in dramatic late pastels.
His interest in this subject was in part shaped by his deep engagement with Japanese woodblock prints — which he collected — as they frequently depicted women engaged in everyday domestic activities.
Degas himself compared such scenes to looking through a keyhole, and that charged sense of accidental witnessing is felt here in every unconsidered angle and unguarded pose. The awkward postures women assume in the privacy of their boudoir — whether bathing or grooming — engaged Degas endlessly and became a perennial subject central to his work.
As wall art, this piece rewards a quieter room — a bedroom, a dressing area, a reading nook where natural light comes in at an angle. Degas brought viewers closer than any artist before him to the everyday lives of these women, letting us in on their most private activities while keeping them somehow distant and mysterious. It's a painting for the attentive viewer: someone drawn less to spectacle than to the poetry of the ordinary, who finds in a moment of self-tending — hair loose, feet bare, no audience intended — something entirely worth stopping for.
