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Lot Essay
In an 1894 article, the art critic Théodore Duret wrote of the novel ways Edgar Degas was addressing the female figure, noting that he placed his women ‘in interiors, among rich fabrics and cushioned furniture. He has no goddesses to offer, none of the legendary heroines of tradition, but the woman as she is, occupied with her ordinary habits of life or of the toilette’ (T. Duret, quoted in R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996, p. 150). Duret’s observation reveals one of the pictorial obsessions that guided Degas’ art from the 1890s onwards: the representation of a woman at her toilette, nude or clothed, quietly and wholly consumed by the ritualistic act of bathing, washing, or drying herself, stretching, reclining, or, as the large, dazzling Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant shows, brushing her hair.
Absent a narrative and devoid of context, these works were radical for their time, featuring women absorbed in a world of their own, lost in a private moment of introspection. In the present composition, a young, redheaded woman sits, entirely engrossed in the act of combing her long locks. On the dressing table before her sit brushes, a fan, a mirror, and an ornate chinoiserie vase, whose crystalline blue gleams in the light. A second figure stands to the right, proffering a cup and saucer. Incongruously, a small dog makes his way across the front of the drawing, skewing the anticipated perspective of the image. The close cropping – one of the artist’s more distinctive and novel pictorial choices – imbued every element with importance even as it challenges the supposedly spontaneous and candid conceit of Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant. A related, albeit less fully resolved pastel is held in the collection of Tate Britain, London.
The subject of a woman combing her hair first emerged in Degas’ work around the mid-1870s, most prominently in the large canvas Femmes se peignant (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). ‘I can readily call to mind the colour of certain hair,’ he wrote in his notebook ‘because I associate it with the colour of gleaming walnut or of hemp, or indeed of horse chestnuts; real hair, with its shimmering flow and its lightness, or its coarseness and its weight’ (E. Degas quoted in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 255). Although he investigated this subject throughout the 1880s – rife as it were with art historical meaning – it was not until the following decade that it recaptured Degas’ imagination, inspiring some of the most inventive and emotionally-charged compositions of his career.
By the late 19th century, the theme of the woman combing her hair had a long artistic lineage, found in Renaissance vanitas portraits, such as Titian's La femme au miroir, a work Degas may have seen in the Louvre, as well as in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Le bain turc. Puvis de Chavannes, whose work Degas was known to have admired, painted many women at various stages of their toilette as did Gustave Courbet, whose Jo, La Belle Irlandaise saw the artist turn a clothed, shoulder-length portrait into a charged image solely by depicting his sitter as she ran her fingers through her luxuriant hair. Indeed, at this time, tumbling waves of long, loose hair were synonymous with sensuality and sexuality in the paintings of both academic and avant-garde artists alike, a fact which would have been known to Degas and with which he played in his own incarnations of this motif. As Richard Kendall explained, ‘Common to all [Degas's] depictions, and perhaps responsible for some of their poignancy, is a rudimentary paradox. On one hand, the act of combing, brushing or attending to the hair is one of the most banal and wearisome of daily routines, associated with personal hygiene as much as glamor. In stark contrast to this banality, hair-combing has a rich and allusive history, intersected by allegorical, literary and sexual traditions, many of which were known to Degas’ (R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., London, 1996, pp. 218-219). For Degas, this pose not only offered an opportunity to portray a staged form of feminine eroticism, but also the chance to immerse himself in the poses and gestures of his bathing models.
In the period during which Degas executed Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant, he was working from his home at 37 Rue Victor-Massé in Montmartre. From the moment that he moved into this cavernous house, he retreated from Paris, what had previously been the central feature of his oeuvre. He left behind the Opéra performances, ballet rehearsals, restaurants, and boulevards that, in the preceding decades, had provided such inspiration for his art. Instead, Degas transferred his intense, curious gaze to the sanctum of the studio, returning to his series of bathers, dancers, and jockeys with a singular intensity.
He began to work chiefly in pastel, the medium that had dominated Degas’ output since the mid-1880s and allowed him to marry both his love of colour with deft draughtsmanship. Indeed, as Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant shows, Degas let colour lead in these late works. The setting becomes a near-abstract amalgamation of planes of multi-layered hues. Amid the background’s soft roses, iridescent turquoises, and flecks of cobalt blue, the woman is radiant, cloaked in an egg-yolk yellow robe. Her cascading red hair shines in the light, with the artist using individual strokes of pastel applied latterly to pick out the highlights. It was the ‘medium that propelled him towards extravagance,’ through which he was able to ‘fuse[] tradition with violent innovation’; by melding staccato dashes with rapid lines and patches of smudged, blended pastel, Degas’ application of colour presaged the abstract imagery that would arise in the subsequent decades (R. Kendall, op. cit, 1996, p. 89).
Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant has a fascinating provenance and was previously held in the collection of Lathrop and Hélène Brown. Born in 1891, Hélène Hopper, the daughter of wealthy Bostonians, inherited a $10 million fortune when her parents tragically died. In 1911, she married Lathrop Brown, a childhood friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a Congressman. Together, they bought an estate in Montauk, Long Island, living and breeding racehorses there until they acquired Saddle Rock Ranch, an expansive property on the coast of Big Sur, California. Their initial small cabin was later replaced with a large and opulent mansion known as Waterfall House where they hung their art collection, including works by Raoul Dufy, Paul Gauguin, and Degas. The Browns purchased Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant in 1921 and it remained in their collection until after Hélène’s death; the work was subsequently acquired by the present owner and has resided in this same collection for over forty years.
Absent a narrative and devoid of context, these works were radical for their time, featuring women absorbed in a world of their own, lost in a private moment of introspection. In the present composition, a young, redheaded woman sits, entirely engrossed in the act of combing her long locks. On the dressing table before her sit brushes, a fan, a mirror, and an ornate chinoiserie vase, whose crystalline blue gleams in the light. A second figure stands to the right, proffering a cup and saucer. Incongruously, a small dog makes his way across the front of the drawing, skewing the anticipated perspective of the image. The close cropping – one of the artist’s more distinctive and novel pictorial choices – imbued every element with importance even as it challenges the supposedly spontaneous and candid conceit of Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant. A related, albeit less fully resolved pastel is held in the collection of Tate Britain, London.
The subject of a woman combing her hair first emerged in Degas’ work around the mid-1870s, most prominently in the large canvas Femmes se peignant (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). ‘I can readily call to mind the colour of certain hair,’ he wrote in his notebook ‘because I associate it with the colour of gleaming walnut or of hemp, or indeed of horse chestnuts; real hair, with its shimmering flow and its lightness, or its coarseness and its weight’ (E. Degas quoted in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, p. 255). Although he investigated this subject throughout the 1880s – rife as it were with art historical meaning – it was not until the following decade that it recaptured Degas’ imagination, inspiring some of the most inventive and emotionally-charged compositions of his career.
By the late 19th century, the theme of the woman combing her hair had a long artistic lineage, found in Renaissance vanitas portraits, such as Titian's La femme au miroir, a work Degas may have seen in the Louvre, as well as in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Le bain turc. Puvis de Chavannes, whose work Degas was known to have admired, painted many women at various stages of their toilette as did Gustave Courbet, whose Jo, La Belle Irlandaise saw the artist turn a clothed, shoulder-length portrait into a charged image solely by depicting his sitter as she ran her fingers through her luxuriant hair. Indeed, at this time, tumbling waves of long, loose hair were synonymous with sensuality and sexuality in the paintings of both academic and avant-garde artists alike, a fact which would have been known to Degas and with which he played in his own incarnations of this motif. As Richard Kendall explained, ‘Common to all [Degas's] depictions, and perhaps responsible for some of their poignancy, is a rudimentary paradox. On one hand, the act of combing, brushing or attending to the hair is one of the most banal and wearisome of daily routines, associated with personal hygiene as much as glamor. In stark contrast to this banality, hair-combing has a rich and allusive history, intersected by allegorical, literary and sexual traditions, many of which were known to Degas’ (R. Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism, exh. cat., London, 1996, pp. 218-219). For Degas, this pose not only offered an opportunity to portray a staged form of feminine eroticism, but also the chance to immerse himself in the poses and gestures of his bathing models.
In the period during which Degas executed Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant, he was working from his home at 37 Rue Victor-Massé in Montmartre. From the moment that he moved into this cavernous house, he retreated from Paris, what had previously been the central feature of his oeuvre. He left behind the Opéra performances, ballet rehearsals, restaurants, and boulevards that, in the preceding decades, had provided such inspiration for his art. Instead, Degas transferred his intense, curious gaze to the sanctum of the studio, returning to his series of bathers, dancers, and jockeys with a singular intensity.
He began to work chiefly in pastel, the medium that had dominated Degas’ output since the mid-1880s and allowed him to marry both his love of colour with deft draughtsmanship. Indeed, as Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant shows, Degas let colour lead in these late works. The setting becomes a near-abstract amalgamation of planes of multi-layered hues. Amid the background’s soft roses, iridescent turquoises, and flecks of cobalt blue, the woman is radiant, cloaked in an egg-yolk yellow robe. Her cascading red hair shines in the light, with the artist using individual strokes of pastel applied latterly to pick out the highlights. It was the ‘medium that propelled him towards extravagance,’ through which he was able to ‘fuse[] tradition with violent innovation’; by melding staccato dashes with rapid lines and patches of smudged, blended pastel, Degas’ application of colour presaged the abstract imagery that would arise in the subsequent decades (R. Kendall, op. cit, 1996, p. 89).
Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant has a fascinating provenance and was previously held in the collection of Lathrop and Hélène Brown. Born in 1891, Hélène Hopper, the daughter of wealthy Bostonians, inherited a $10 million fortune when her parents tragically died. In 1911, she married Lathrop Brown, a childhood friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a Congressman. Together, they bought an estate in Montauk, Long Island, living and breeding racehorses there until they acquired Saddle Rock Ranch, an expansive property on the coast of Big Sur, California. Their initial small cabin was later replaced with a large and opulent mansion known as Waterfall House where they hung their art collection, including works by Raoul Dufy, Paul Gauguin, and Degas. The Browns purchased Femme en peignoir jaune se coiffant in 1921 and it remained in their collection until after Hélène’s death; the work was subsequently acquired by the present owner and has resided in this same collection for over forty years.