Le Tub

A red-haired woman crouches in a shallow tub in the cool morning light, a sponge raised to her neck. Degas wanted us to feel we had glanced through a keyhole, and in 1886 this small pastel stirred both admiration and outrage.

The story behind the painting

The Tub is a pastel on heavy wove paper from 1886, one of seven pastels Degas made in the mid-1880s showing women bathing or drying themselves in private rooms. By then pastel, which he had first used for sketching, had become his favourite medium. It was cheaper to produce and easier to sell, and Degas came to love the expressive power of coloured chalks, so much that in his bathers it replaced oil and monotype. Unusually for his time, he exhibited pastels on an equal footing with paintings. He showed The Tub with the related nudes at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, where the group was seen as a highlight.

What to look for

A soft, cool morning light fills the room with a bluish glow, falling on the woman's back, shoulders and arms. She steadies herself with her left hand and lifts a sponge to her neck with her right. On the right, the hard tilted edge of a cupboard or dressing table cuts down the picture, as if we were looking down from a doorway. On top sit two jugs, a hairpiece, curling tongs and a hairbrush. The chestnut of her hair and sponge returns in the copper pot and the false hair. Look closely at the green, yellow and red threads of the rug and the blue and orange streaks in the water.

Meaning and intent

Degas rejected the idealised nude of mythology and academic convention. He told George Moore that until then the nude had always posed for an audience, but his women were honest, simple people absorbed in their own bodies, "as if you looked through a keyhole". Bernd Growe suggests that this break from convention is why some critics accused him of voyeurism, while for Degas it was a commitment to unembellished truth. Instead of firm contours, Degas built form from hatched strokes of colour; Carol Armstrong notes how the nude moves between description and abstraction, toward a tactile sense of form rather than a simple record of what was seen.

Legacy

Most critics praised the realism; Jules Desclozeaux wrote of "the sharp gaze of a surgeon", and George Moore and others compared the pose to the Crouching Venus in the Louvre. Octave Mirbeau saw the power of a Gothic statue. Joris-Karl Huysmans was the harshest voice, describing the woman's body in brutal terms. From about 1890 Degas's nudes grew popular with collectors and influenced Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. Bought first by Emile Boussod, then in 1895 by Count Isaac de Camondo, the pastel was bequeathed to the Louvre in 1908, first shown there in 1914, and moved to the Musee d'Orsay after it opened in 1986.