Nicholas Mulroy

Degas was a bit of a weirdo. He had a thing for women’s hair, and once wrote to Bizet to ask for permission to watch the composer’s wife take her hair down (me neither). It makes some sense, then, that this domestic scene of a maid brushing her lady’s hair should be so full of unexpected strangeness. Some questions: look at the seated woman’s hands: are they lifted in pain or ecstasy (or both?)? Is she pregnant? Is it a theatre curtain behind them? Are we glimpsing this furtively, through a keyhole? Her features – the taciturn mouth, the eyebrows, and especially her nostrils – are painted with abrupt violence, like terse visual punctuation (good name for a band). The hair itself is too voluminous to be realistic (steady, Edgar) and is tugged back with some force – what’s the backstory between these two? Look at the blush of the cheek on the left, where a simple dab of paint hints at something visceral and even out of control. Finally, the colour: apart from the maid’s gentle pastel shades, this pic is like a psychological heat map, where realism is overwhelmed by the crackle of russet, auburn, red, which suggests a symphony of passion, fire, and fury. Colour is the most visible part of a painting, but here is deployed to show us what we can’t see as well as what we can: emotion, mysterious subtext, and a personal history that might encompass everything from unspoken anger to bittersweet yearning.