Combing the Hair

by Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas’s Combing the Hair crystallizes a private ritual into a scene of compressed intimacy and classed labor. The incandescent field of red fuses figure and room, turning the hair into a binding ribbon between attendant and sitter ^[1].

Fast Facts

Year: c.1896
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 114.3 × 146.7 cm
Location: The National Gallery, London

Combing the Hair by Edgar Degas (c.1896) featuring Flame‑red field, Tress of hair as binding ribbon, Brush in motion, Apron and work blouse

Meaning & Symbolism

Degas constructs the scene as a choreography of opposing forces—yielding and pulling, exposure and concealment. The reclining woman stretches one arm to steady herself while the other woman anchors the composition with a firm, downward brushstroke; the diagonal from the attendant’s shoulder through the taut arm to the glowing sweep of hair converts routine care into palpable effort. The servant’s pale blouse and apron mark her role as laborer, yet Degas refuses sentimentality; the attendant’s face is absorbed, professional, almost abstracted from the sitter’s closed, registering features. A small arsenal of toilette tools—a brush, a hand mirror, and bottles—floats on the lower right tabletop like props after their cue, tethering the action to the long European tradition of the toilette as a site of self‑fashioning and vanity ¹. The red curtain that slips in at the upper left operates as a theatrical scrim: it both announces the artifice of display and implies our status as viewers who have caught the moment from the wings, a backstage glance that complicates privacy with spectacle ¹⁴. Form does the work of meaning. The overwhelming reds—laid in rough strokes over a light ground and scored by black linear accents—collapse figure and environment, producing a shallow, pressurized room where air seems scarce and heat palpable ¹⁶. In this charged atmosphere, the hair becomes a flame‑colored conduit between bodies, a visual ligature that joins while it is being tugged apart. Degas thus translates nineteenth‑century obsessions with women’s hair—its erotic potency, its moralized display—into an image where touch is both caring and coercive ⁵. The cropping intensifies this tension: the sitter’s body is truncated, the attendant’s legs cut from view, and a sliver of curtain and wall bracket the figures like a camera’s edge, asserting modern vision while withholding narrative resolution ¹⁷. Art‑historical echoes matter here. Degas’s lifelong devotion to drawing and to Ingres’s linear discipline undergirds the taut contours, while his admiration for Japanese prints informs the off‑center vantage and the pattern‑like red field ¹. At the same time, the image pushes beyond Impressionism’s optical notes toward a post‑Impressionist insistence on color as affect and structure; red is not describing a room so much as declaring the scene’s temperature and the sitter’s ambiguous discomfort—soothing, even erotic, yet edged with pain ¹. This ambiguity is Degas’s ethical stance: he neither idealizes beauty nor indicts labor, but fixes on the modern interior as a place where service and intimacy rub against each other until they spark. The work’s intentionally open passages—the sketchy tabletop objects, the rubbed curtain, the visible reworking—signal late Degas’s refusal of polished finish and his faith that meaning can reside in the very friction of making ⁶⁷. Combing the Hair is therefore a summation: of the artist’s decades‑long interest in bathing and coiffure scenes, of his fascination with backstage spaces, and of his conviction that routine gestures can bear the full weight of modern life ²³⁷.

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Interpretations

Technical/Material Analysis: Late Degas and the Aesthetics of Unfinish

The picture’s “open” construction—areas left sketchy, red laid thinly over a light ground, assertive black linear accents—belongs to Degas’s late practice, where process is visible and finish is deliberately withheld ¹⁴. Conservation research notes that the canvas was enlarged and kept unlined, and that Degas intended further reworking; its residence in his studio until 1917 corroborates an ongoing, iterative making ¹. This aesthetic of friction—dragged brushwork, revisable contours, suspended detail—shifts meaning from mere depiction to embodied experiment. Rather than an incomplete statement, the work enacts a modernist claim: facture is expressive structure. The hot, compressed red field is thus not simply atmosphere; it is a material decision that organizes space, pressurizes touch, and encodes the sitter’s ambiguous sensations into the very skin of the paint ¹⁴.

Source: National Gallery, London; NGA Facture, vol. 3

Socio‑Economic Reading: Domestic Service and Intimate Labor

Apron and blouse index the attendant as a paid worker, anchoring the composition in classed domestic service ¹. Richard Kendall traces Degas’s movement from explicit narratives (brothel monotypes) to late interiors where story is withheld yet power relations persist as posture and pressure ³. Here, strain is legible in the diagonal arm and the downward combing force; the mistress’s truncated body and the maid’s cropped legs swap identity for function, making labor itself the scene’s protagonist. The painting suspends sentimentality: the attendant’s absorbed expression reads as professional concentration, not affection, while proximity produces intimacy without equality. In late nineteenth‑century Paris, such paid intimacy—grooming, bathing, dressing—occupied a liminal zone between care and control, which Degas renders through formal tension rather than moralizing ¹³.

Source: National Gallery, London; Richard Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism

Iconography of Hair: Victorian Erotics and Discipline

Victorian culture endowed women’s hair with totemic power—a site of erotic allure, virtue, and social regulation (Gitter) ⁵. Degas leverages that charge by making the hair a flame‑colored conduit between bodies, activated by touch and managed by tools (comb, brush, mirror) that tether the scene to the toilette tradition from Titian onward ¹. The Met’s related pastels show the theme’s serial refinement: combing is both routine and theater, a ritual of self‑fashioning and control ². In the London canvas, the vivid red field intensifies this ambivalence—pleasure tinged with pain—as if sensation radiated from the hair itself. The result is an image where sensuality meets discipline, and femininity is produced through repeated, sometimes coercive, acts of grooming ¹²⁵.

Source: Elisabeth Gitter (PMLA); The Met; National Gallery, London

Theatricality and the Backstage Gaze

The sliver of red curtain at upper left functions like a theatrical scrim, announcing artifice and positioning us as viewers peering from the wings ¹. Cropping—amputated limbs, bracketed edges—intensifies the sense of a stolen glimpse, a visual rhetoric long associated with Degas’s “behind‑the‑scenes” modernity. Press criticism underscores the unsettling intimacy: the picture’s uncomfortable red and camera‑like vantage invite a voyeuristic reading while withholding narrative certainty about the women’s relationship ⁶. Yet Degas complicates voyeurism by emphasizing labor and facture; our gaze meets the resistant surface of paint and the professional focus of the attendant. The scene is staged, but what is staged is work, not exhibitionism—privacy is rendered as spectacle precisely to expose the mechanics of seeing in modern art ¹⁶.

Source: National Gallery, London; The Guardian

Lineage and Synthesis: Ingres, Japonisme, and Post‑Impressionist Color

Degas fuses Ingresque line—taut contours, disciplined drawing—with lessons from Japanese prints: off‑center vantage, planar compression, pattern fields ¹⁷. The pairing of seated woman and standing attendant nods to Old Master precedents (e.g., Ingres’s Turkish Bath), yet the chromatic strategy is modern: red is deployed not to describe decor but to structure affect and space, anticipating post‑Impressionist color as architecture ¹. The Phillips Collection’s related works trace how Japanese compositional devices inflect Degas’s serial treatments of coiffure, culminating here in a shallow, pressurized room that reads as designed surface as much as depicted interior ⁷. The painting thus articulates a hinge between academic lineage and avant‑garde vision—drawing’s authority harnessed to color’s emotive, organizing force ¹⁷.

Source: National Gallery, London; The Phillips Collection

About Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) trained in rigorous drawing, revered the Old Masters, and pursued modern urban subjects—from races to café-concerts and ballet. Though he exhibited with the Impressionists, he insisted on a controlled, realist construction of scenes, often synthesizing observations into complex studio compositions ^[5]^[6].

View all works by Edgar Degas →

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The Opera Orchestra by Edgar Degas | Analysis

Edgar Degas

In The Opera Orchestra, Degas flips the theater’s hierarchy: the black-clad pit fills the frame while the ballerinas appear only as cropped tutus and legs, glittering above. The diagonal bassoon and looming double bass marshal a dense field of faces lit by footlights, turning backstage labor into the subject and spectacle into a fragment [1][2].

The Tub

Edgar Degas (1886)

In The Tub (1886), Edgar Degas turns a routine bath into a study of modern solitude and embodied labor. From a steep, overhead angle, a woman kneels within a circular basin, one hand braced on the rim while the other gathers her hair; to the right, a tabletop packs a ewer, copper pot, comb/brush, and cloth. Degas’s layered pastel binds skin, water, and objects into a single, breathing field of warm flesh tones and blue‑greys, collapsing distance between body and still life [1].

The Ballet Class

Edgar Degas (1873–1876)

The Ballet Class shows the work behind grace: a green-walled studio where young dancers in white tutus rest, fidget, and stretch while the gray-suited master stands with his cane. Degas’s diagonal floorboards, cropped viewpoints, and scattered props—a watering can, a music stand, even a tiny dog—stage a candid vision of routine rather than spectacle. The result is a modern image of discipline, hierarchy, and fleeting poise.

Woman Ironing

Edgar Degas (c. 1876–1887)

In Woman Ironing, Degas builds a modern icon of labor through contre‑jour light and a forceful diagonal from shoulder to iron. The worker’s silhouette, red-brown dress, and the cool, steamy whites around her turn repetition into ritualized transformation—wrinkled cloth to crisp order [1][2].

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage

Edgar Degas (ca. 1874)

Degas’s The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage turns a moment of practice into a modern drama of work and power. Under harsh footlights, clustered ballerinas stretch, yawn, and repeat steps as a ballet master/conductor drives the tempo, while abonnés lounge in the wings and a looming double bass anchors the labor of music [1][3][4].

Place de la Concorde

Edgar Degas (1875)

Degas’s Place de la Concorde turns a famous Paris square into a study of modern isolation and instantaneous vision. Figures stride past one another without contact, their bodies abruptly cropped and adrift in a wide, airless plaza—an urban stage where elegance masks estrangement [1][2].