La pedicura

A girl wrapped in a white sheet sits on a flowered sofa while a bald man bends over her foot. Degas lets us watch a private moment, as he liked to say, through the keyhole.

The story behind the painting

Degas made this picture in 1873, painting on paper that was later mounted on canvas. The subject looks ahead to the many works he would later devote to women at their toilette. Here he chose an adolescent girl who seems to have just stepped out of a bath. She sits on a sofa with floral upholstery in a middle-class interior, wrapped in a white cloth that hides her nakedness, while the dress she has taken off lies beside her on the same sofa.

What to look for

On the left a bald man bends low over her foot to give her a pedicure, and the girl helps him by resting her foot on a chair that is also covered with a white sheet. At the upper left a small table holds a few things needed for personal care. Notice the many whites: the sheet around the girl, the sheet on the chair, set against the flowered sofa and the discarded dress. It is a quiet, ordinary slice of domestic life in a bourgeois room of the time.

Meaning and intent

The details are telling. Degas deliberately keeps the girl within the bounds of propriety, still far from the extreme solutions of his mature years, when he would show fully naked female bodies without mercy. Yet the work follows the rules of realism. Degas turns the viewer into an unwitting witness of a private scene not meant for outside eyes, one that seems to be spied on through the keyhole, a phrase the painter himself often liked to repeat. The subject is foot care, a tranche de vie, a slice of life.

Legacy

The Pedicure also shows the eclecticism that drove Degas's whole career and his readiness to try very different techniques. While Monet, for example, never left oil on canvas, Degas experimented and found a support he truly enjoyed, paper, as in this picture. The scene of bathing and grooming anticipates the long series of toilette pictures that would follow in his later years. The work, about 61 by 46 cm, is kept in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.