Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 'Combing the Hair ('La Coiffure')', about 1896

Women combing their hair, or having it combed, often appear in Degas’s work – for example, in his early Beach Scene, also in the National Gallery. This late painting is one of his boldest treatments of the subject.

Here, a maid, wearing her servant’s uniform, combs the hair of her seated mistress, who is not yet fully dressed and who may also be pregnant. Pulled back by the force of the strokes, the mistress raises her right hand to her head as if in pain, or perhaps just to steady herself or hold her hair in place.

Degas may originally have used his own maid, Zoé Closier, who he also photographed, as a model for the maid in his preparatory drawings. However, he replaced her with the woman we see here who, like the mistress, was most likely a professional model. Degas’s choice of this subject in part reflects his interest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he collected, as they often show women engaged in everyday domestic activities. But a more immediate precedent was Ingres’s The Turkish Bath (1862–3, Louvre, Paris), in which a seated woman, seen in profile, has her hair plaited by another who stands behind her. A keen admirer of Ingres, Degas was very familiar with this painting, and defended it against its critics.

The principal colours of Degas’s picture are limited to variations of a fiery orange-red painted over a creamy white ground that is still visible on the left of the canvas. In other areas, such as to the right of the curtain, you can also see traces of grey-black underpainting. Degas relieves the intensity of the orange-reds by introducing other tonally related colours such as the yellow comb and brush and the maid’s pink blouse. His use of colour is not naturalistic or descriptive but has an expressive, perhaps even symbolic, dimension, which gives an ordinary domestic scene a feeling of almost claustrophobic intensity. Perhaps the red is metaphor for the pain or discomfort felt by the mistress.

Although the picture shows Degas’s great skill in using colour, drawing remains paramount. He sketches in the composition, and also adds final details (for example, in the mistress’s face) with swift, bold strokes of black paint containing charcoal. He structures the image by creating a powerful diagonal, which runs down from the maid’s head and arm along the length of her mistress’s body. The standing maid also creates a vertical on the right that is complemented on the picture’s left by the upward line of the curtain.

Some areas are more defined than others – the objects on the table, for example, look unfinished. Degas probably planned to work further on the painting, as he enlarged it by placing it on a bigger stretcher. However, we can only guess what he intended, as it was never completed and remained in his studio. Two years after his death, the painting was bought by Henri Matisse.