Monotype, 31.3 x 27.9 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
As Degas explained to the Irish writer George Moore, ‘Until now the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, involved solely and entirely in what they are doing. Here is an individual person; she is washing her feet. It is as if you were looking through a keyhole.’ In none of these Toilettes does Degas individualise the facial features of his models. Faces are either hidden or blurred and indiscernible. Degas’ subject is ‘woman’ rather than particular women. He observes her behaviour with the pseudo-objectivity of a scientist studying a primitive tribe or another species. Such an attitude seems disconcerting in today’s moral and political climate. Degas himself remarked ‘I have perhaps too often perceived woman as an animal.'
Another reason for Degas’ avoidance of his models’ faces may have been his disgust for the slick and salacious female nudes on show at the Paris Salons. The obscenity of those pictures lay not so much in the nudity as in the coyly enticing facial expressions. There were those who regarded Degas’ Toilettes as an attack on womanhood and a denial of sensuality. Even Joris Karl Huysmans, who greatly admired Degas’ work, took this view, claiming that Degas had ‘in the face of his own century flung the grossest insult by overthrowing woman, the idol who has always been so gently treated, whom he degrades by showing her naked in the bathtub and in the humiliating dispositions of her private toilet’. For Huysmans Degas had gloried in ‘his disdain for the flesh as no artist has ventured to do since the Middle Ages...’
Far from disdaining flesh, many of these Toilettes express a powerful if sublimated eroticism. Both colour and line become increasingly charged with sensuality as the series progresses. The rituals of washing can themselves be erotically charged, as we see from The Pretty Women of Paris, in which the personal hygiene of the women is described in enthusiastic detail. Clara Dermigny would offer her customers erotic books to read ‘while she is getting ready for them by performing the preliminary ablutions’, and Elina Denizane was nicknamed Fleur-de-Bidet ‘because she is always astride that useful article of furniture, which plays such an important part in the toilette of a Frenchwoman’. It is no coincidence that the theme of the Toilette was first touched upon in the series of monotype prints devoted to the brothel in the late 1870s. In Admiration, the voyeurism is made comically explicit by the appearance of a portly middle-aged man who seems to crawl up from underneath the bathtub. In another print from the series, a dark-suited gentleman quietly watches a nude woman combing her hair.