Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub

Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub is a remarkable drawing created by Edgar Degas around 1885. Classified as a drawing rather than a painting, this piece utilizes charcoal and pastel on wove paper, originally a light green hue now aged to a warm gray tone, laid down on silk bolting. This choice of medium allowed Degas to work swiftly, blending the rich depth of charcoal with the vibrant yet diffuse color of pastel to define volume and form. The delicate handling highlights the artist’s mastery of line, focusing on the outline and mass of the figure over strictly realistic rendering.

The work falls within a significant period of Degas’s career when he frequently explored the subject of female nudes engaged in private acts of toilette and bathing. Unlike earlier academic traditions that idealized the nude in mythological settings, Degas captures the woman in an intimate, almost unselfconscious pose, emphasizing the ordinary reality of modern Parisian domesticity. The figure is positioned within the compositional framework using sharp diagonals, lending a sense of candid immediacy to the scene.

This powerful example of Degas's focus on women’s private lives is housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It provides key insight into the artist’s increasing use of pastels late in his career, which provided the textural flexibility he sought. As a widely recognized drawing by a major figure in nineteenth-century French art, this image is now part of the public domain, allowing for extensive study and the creation of fine art prints.