After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself

Painted around 1890, After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself at the Princeton Art Museum belongs to Degas's final, most radical phase of nude studies. By the 1890s his eyesight was deteriorating, and the works from this period are paradoxically among his most physicaly intense — the reduced visual acuity seeming to push him toward even bolder simplification of form and more emphatic modeling. These late bathing women are sculptural in quality, the figures conceived in the round and carved with heavy, directional marks. The subject by this period had become almost abstract: a series of formal problems about mass, movement, and light.

The work likely reflects Degas's late style: heavy, raking strokes that model the figure with an almost tactile urgency. Forms are built through superimposed layers, creating a rich surface texture. His palette in the 1890s tends toward higher saturation — vivid oranges, pinks, and cool blues in shadows — departing from the more naturalistic color of his earlier nudes. The figure is treated as pure sculptural form.