After the Bath 1877

Edgar Degas made "After the Bath" using pastel on paper. He was a French artist, working in a time of rapid social change, who made a name for himself depicting modern life. Here, we see a nude woman from the back, seemingly caught unawares as she dries her hair. The intimate, domestic scene may seem like a straightforward snapshot. But in France at the time, the depiction of the female nude was a highly coded and policed area. A male artist painting a woman required her to be read as an allegory of beauty, or as a mythological figure, not just a woman in her home. Degas was part of a group of artists testing the boundaries of academic tradition. His art, like that of his contemporaries, was often critiqued as immoral. We can understand such works better by researching not just the artist, but the social, cultural and institutional context in which he worked.