Edgar Degas
Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His "La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans", or "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years", which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming". In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned. The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".
After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself
Nine of Degas' pastel drawings of women at their bath were exhibited by Theo Van Gogh at Galerie Boussod et Valadon in 1888. The work was shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1950 and was bought for the collection of the National Gallery, London in 1959. A less highly worked example of a similar subject is in the Courtauld Gallery, and other works in the series are in many public museums.
The work had a considerable influence on Francis Bacon, most noticeably on his triptychs "Three Figures in a Room" (1964, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and "Three Studies of the Male Back" (1970, Kunsthaus Zürich). The Tate Gallery says "For Bacon [it] was indeed something of a talisman. It epitomised Degas's approach to a larger obsession the two artists shared with the plasticity of the body, its potential for the most varied forms of articulation, in movement and repose." The work was one of three central nudes chosen by Bacon in his "The Artist's Choice" exhibition at the National Gallery in 1985, shown between Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" and Michelangelo's "Entombment". Art historian and curator Michael Peppiatt quoted Bacon thus: "I love Degas. I think his pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they're far greater than his paintings."