The Toilette (La Toilette)

The Toilette (c.1887) at the Barnes Foundation engages a traditional genre subject — woman at her dressing table, preparing or attending to personal grooming — that Degas and Renoir were simultaneously exploring with very different intentions. Degas's intimate, sometimes voyeuristic bather series were being produced at exactly this moment, treating the female figure at her toilet with psychological acuity and technical brilliance. Renoir's approach was warmly sensuous. Cézanne's is almost impassively formal: the figure's back, the arc of the arm, the spatial relationship between body and background are analyzed as formal problems equivalent to his landscape subjects. By 1887 Cézanne was entirely independent of the Impressionist group, working in Aix without significant contact with the Paris art world. The Barnes Foundation's holding of this figure work alongside the Card Players and Peasant Standing with Arms Crossed allows it to be understood within the context of his sustained figure-painting ambitions, which have sometimes been overshadowed by the still lifes and landscapes in critical literature.

The female figure is described through simplified planar forms—the back's curved planes, the arms' cylindrical volumes—treated with the same structural analysis as geological forms. The setting is loosely indicated; the figure dominates. Warm and cool color alternation models the figure's surface without conventional tonal chiaroscuro.