Shop art print and framed art Femme à la toilette, essuyant son pied gauche by Edgar Degas

Woman Drying Her Feet is a pastel by the French painter Edgar Degas, executed in 1886 and currently housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. "The woman "washing her feet" mentioned by Degas is precisely the one depicted in this pastel. With the complacency of a voyeur, Degas contemplates the abandonment of the female body in its presumed solitude, and captures it at the moment when it spontaneously devotes itself to its own care, without assuming aesthetic attitudes aimed at satisfying the eventual observer." The pastel, in fact, depicts a young woman who, in the act of drying her feet after a bath, places her body in a disharmonious pose, which would be considered by traditional aesthetic canons to be absolutely inappropriate for a female nude. The red hair falls messily down her legs and stands out chromatically from the armchair behind, with its bright canary yellow upholstery, giving the work a pleasing agility of composition. The woman, moreover, faithfully respects Degas's prescriptions and seems to be spied "through the keyhole". This sensation is corroborated by the presence of a jamb on the right, suggesting the presence of a spectator observing the scene from a vantage point not visible to the [...]

 

This artwork is a drawing from the modern period. It belongs to the impressionism style.

 

« Femme à la toilette, essuyant son pied gauche » is kept at Louvre, Paris, France.

 

Find the full description of Femme à la toilette, essuyant son pied gauche by Edgar Degas on Wikipedia.