About this work
What strikes you first is pure, immersive red — the whole canvas seems seen through a fiery filter. A woman sits on a low chair, facing left, her long red hair being worked through by a maid standing behind her, against an orange-red wall and scarlet curtain.
The maid, in her servant's uniform, pulls the comb through with evident force; the seated mistress raises her right hand to her head as if steadying herself against the tension of each stroke.
A powerful diagonal runs from the maid's head and arm down the full length of the mistress's reclining body, while the maid's vertical figure on the right is answered on the left by the upward line of a heavy curtain — a composition of remarkable structural discipline beneath its seemingly spontaneous surface. Degas produced this almost monochromatic masterwork using three distinct red pigments , and the creamy white ground left exposed at the canvas's edge makes the surrounding heat feel all the more concentrated.
The painting dates to around 1896 , placing it firmly in Degas's late period, when failing eyesight pushed him toward bolder colour and increasingly abbreviated mark-making. He enlarged the canvas by placing it on a bigger stretcher — evidence he planned to develop it further — yet it was never completed and remained in his studio until his death.
Two years after he died, the painting was bought by Henri Matisse — a transaction that reads almost as an act of artistic inheritance, one radical colourist recognising another. Degas's interest in the subject was shaped partly by his collection of Japanese woodblock prints, which frequently depicted women in everyday domestic rituals, and by his deep admiration for Ingres's *The Turkish Bath* (1862–3), in which a seated woman has her hair plaited by a standing figure behind her.
What makes the work especially prescient is how it anticipates abstraction: remove the two figures, and the red curtain and white table resolve into something approaching a non-representational field.
As a print, *La Coiffure* demands a wall that can hold its heat — a room with natural light that catches the variation between tangerine and deep copper, a neutral or dark interior where the red commands rather than competes. With its bold use of red, the painting carries an immediate, almost gravitational impact. It speaks to the viewer drawn to work that operates at the edge of finish — where a brushstroke does the work of ten, and incompleteness feels entirely intentional. The mood is neither tender nor harsh, but intensely physical: two bodies, one act, a private domestic moment rendered monumental.
