Woman in her Bath Sponging her Leg

Woman in her Bath Sponging her Leg, a pastel from around 1883 now at the Louvre, belongs to the pivotal series of bathing women Degas developed throughout the 1880s and exhibited en masse at the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886. These works provoked strong reactions: some critics saw them as the pinnacle of objective observation, others as voyeuristic or misogynistic. Degas himself described them as depicting women 'as if you looked through a keyhole' — a formulation that captured both their intimate candor and their unsentimental quality. The pastel medium, which Degas used with increasing mastery, allowed him to build up rich, layered surfaces with directional marks that followed the body's contours.

Pastel allows Degas to work with colored light directly — overlaid strokes in different hues that fuse optically rather than being mixed on a palette. The warm tones of the figure are built through layers of reds, oranges, and pinks, with cooler shadows in blues and purples. His stroke follows the body's rounded forms, creating a sense of three-dimensional mass. The bath itself and its surroundings are handled more loosely, keeping visual focus on the figure.