After the Bath

Edgar Degas

Contemporary-Art.org
Keywords: Bath

Work Overview

After the Bath
Edgar Degas
Date: c.1885
Style: Impressionism
Genre: nude painting (nu)
Media: pastel


Like all the young people of his generation who wanted a career in art, Degas received a training based on drawing nude figures. Considered to be the most difficult and the most instructive exercise, l'académie – the study of the nude figure that generated many of the drawings presented here – was taught in the studios where Degas started his training, those of Barrias (1822-1907) and Lamothe (1822-1869), both disciples of Ingres.
Artists at that time learned the art of painting the nude by copying the sculptures of classical antiquity and the old masters, or by working from a life model.


Firstly at the Louvre and the Cabinet des Estampes in the Bibliothèque Nationale, then during an extended trip around Italy from 1856 to 1859 when he visited the greatest Renaissance museums and monuments, Degas built up a great understanding of the painting of his illustrious predecessors that would accompany all of his stylistic evolutions, even the most avant-garde.


However, by looking to the past, Degas was not searching for a model to follow slavishly but rather a series of perspectives that would enable him to create his own style. It is this synthesis that explains the originality of Degas' compositions, even though these early paintings are in the great historical genre beloved by the academicians of the time. 
Thus, Young Spartans Exercising, evokes Antiquity but mainly provides the artist with an opportunity to demonstrate his research into the human figure, if we are to believe the many studies he had produced earlier. The accuracy of his drawing certainly conforms to the teaching he had received, but the attention given to the gestures appears to be totally original.