11. Edgar Degas - After the Bath Woman - Drying Herself. 1889-90, 68 x 58cm. From the mid-1880s onwards, the subject of women bathing in tubs or drying themselves became one of Degas’ central preoccupations. His aims in his pictures of bathing women were to show ‘a human creature occupied with herself – a cat who licks herself. Hitherto, the nude has always been represented in poses which presupposes an audience, but these women of mine are honest and simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition … It is as if you looked through a key-hole.’