Breakfast after the Bath
1895/98
Medium
Pastel on paper laid down on board
Dimensions
92 × 81 cm (36 1/4 × 31 15/16 in.)
Classification
pastel
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
152712
Art Historical Context
In the late 1890s, Edgar Degas crafted *Breakfast after the Bath* (1895/98), a luminous pastel paper laid down on board 92 × 81 cm, now housed in the Art Institute Chicago's Prints and Drawings. This intimate scene captures a woman in a private moment of repose after bathing, seated at a table with a cup of coffee—a quintessential subject from Degas's later career. As a leading figure in Impressionism, though he eschewed the label, Degas shifted from ballet dancers to these voyeuristic glimpses of modern women's daily lives, reflecting the changing roles of women in fin-de-siècle France. Dega...
About the Artist
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · 1834–1917
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, born on July 19, 1834, in Paris to a prosperous banking family, was the eldest of five children. His mother, Célestine Musson, a Creole from New Orleans whose father Germain Musson had roots in Haiti, died when Degas was thirteen, leaving his father Augustin and unmarried uncles to guide him. Educated at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he earned a baccalauréat in...