Combing the Hair

Combing the Hair, painted around 1896 and now at the National Gallery in London, belongs to Degas's late, visually intense period of female grooming subjects. By the 1890s his eyesight was deteriorating badly, yet the late works are not diminished but transformed: colors are deeper, more saturated, and the figures are rendered with an almost sculptural urgency. This work shows a woman having her hair combed by another figure — a maid or companion — in an interior saturated with orange-red warmth. The colors are extraordinary: the entire space is suffused with a hot amber glow that transforms the domestic act into something almost primal. It represents Degas's late style at its most chromatic extreme.

The dominant red-orange color temperature is the painting's most striking feature — Degas bathes the entire scene in warm artificial light that approaches abstraction. The figures are built through heavily worked oil paint, with directional strokes modeling the body's masses. The hair, being combed in long fluid strokes, becomes both subject and visual metaphor for the painting's own linear energy. The late style shows his progression toward pure form and color at the expense of detail.