Bather Drying Herself

Bather Drying Herself

Edgar Degas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Scenes of women bathing or drying themselves after a bath are a recurrent subject in Degas’s drawings and paintings. He depicted his models as if they were unaware of his presence, often from up close, imbuing these works with an erotic intimacy that verges on voyeurism. With their contorted poses, crouched down in a bathtub or leaning over to towel off their neck, back, or legs, Degas’s bathers serve as a pendant to his depictions of ballerinas, in which he focused on the elegant contours of the performing female body. Both offered opportunities to study the human form in movement and the play of light on the body, here emphasized by areas of dark shading in charcoal.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.