Woman Having Her Hair Combed

Woman Having Her Hair Combed belongs to the intimate bather and toilette series that preoccupied Degas from the 1880s onward, in which women perform acts of bodily care unobserved, in private spaces that Degas renders with the quality of surveillance. The hair-combing subject specifically allowed him to study the extended, physically demanding act of a woman's toilet as pure form — the arc of the outstretched neck, the pull of the comb — without social or narrative distraction. The pastel medium was his primary vehicle for these studies.

Degas builds the figure through overlapping layers of pastel in multiple directions, the hatching creating a luminous, almost textile surface. The woman's orange-red hair, catching artificial or warm natural light, is the chromatic centre of the composition, rendered through dense, directional marks that describe both colour and the physical weight of the hair.