©Pablo Picasso - Hairdressing 1906
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Hairdressing 1906
174x99cm oil/canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:
Although today art historians associate a woman at her toilette with Edgar Degas's famous series of nude bathers, shown in Paris at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition and repeated in his oeuvre until about 1910, it is unlikely that Picasso could have seen many examples. Degas had drawn inspiration from the Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and that same source was used by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Auguste Renoir in their development of the theme at the end of the nineteenth century. In an odd twist, however, Picasso chose to suppress in this picture all the eroticism that normally attends the subject. Instead, he turns the picture into a contrapuntal variation on the Holy Family, with echoes of Leonardo's "Virgin and Saint Anne" at the Musée du Louvre.
Picasso painted this composition on a much-used canvas: there are at least three complete paintings beneath the present surface.