Woman Washing her Hair

In October 1906 Walter Sickert exhibited ten pictures at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and arrived in the capital from Dieppe in order to attend the opening. He took a room at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank of the Seine directly opposite the Louvre, which he described as ‘my enchanting hotel a few doors off the house where Ingres died’, where apparently the ‘alcove of the beds in some of the rooms are beautifully lit’.1 Much favoured by artists and writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, previous patrons of the hotel included Richard Wagner, Charles Baudelaire and Camille Pissarro, who had painted a number of views from a window on the third floor during 1903.2 Sickert himself had first stayed there in 1883, in the company of Oscar Wilde (who later died there in 1900). The purpose of that visit had been to deliver Whistler’s iconic portrait of his mother to the Salon, but the trip also marked the occasion of Sickert’s first meeting with Edgar Degas, the French painter who was to have such a profound influence on the direction of his art. Possibly stimulated by memories of that significant moment in his career, or simply enthralled by the artistic ferment of Parisian life, during his visit in 1906 Sickert opted to stay in the hotel for some weeks, during which time he used the room as a studio and produced a large number of paintings and drawings. He wrote to his friend, the painter William Rothenstein, that he was ‘doing a whole set of interiors in the hotel, mostly nudes’, as well as some theatrical subjects.3 This burst of creativity led to a successful solo exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in January 1907. Woman Washing her Hair dates from this period. Painted in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, it was exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune under the title, La Toilette, and later acquired by the gallery in 1910.4

The young, slim model for Woman Washing her Hair was a French girl named Blanche whom Sickert later described as ‘most enchanting ... the thinnest of the thin like a little eel, exquisitely shaped, with red hair’.5 He recalled that: