La Toilette

Painted in 1870 and held at the Musée Fabre, 'La Toilette' is among Bazille's most sophisticated figure compositions. The subject of a woman at her morning toilet had a long French precedent from Boucher through Degas, but Bazille's treatment is characteristically direct and unidealized: a real woman, in a real interior, in natural light. Painted in his final active year before his death in November 1870, it reflects the maturity he was approaching at 28—a capacity to treat intimate subjects with psychological seriousness and technical fluency that, had he survived, might have placed him among the leading figures of French modernism.

The interior is lit with soft, warm light that models the figure and the white fabrics of the toilette setting with careful gradation. Bazille's handling of white on white—linen against skin, fabric on fabric—is particularly accomplished, using subtle chromatic variation rather than sharp value contrast.