Woman Combing/Braiding/Arranging/Caressing her Hair

Originally published in 2009. Revised on 28 May 2024.

This is a post about pictures depicting a woman / women Combing/Braiding/Arranging/Caressing her / their Hair.

This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.

Titian, La Femme au miroir (Woman with a Mirror), circa 1515
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: height: 96 cm (37.7 in); width: 76 cm (29.9 in)
Collection: Louvre Museum

There is a variant of the picture in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, attributed to Titian’s workshop.

This image is in the public domain. You can copy, modify and distribute this image.

Workshop of Titian, Allegory of Love, c. 1520/1540
Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: overall: 91.4 x 81.9 cm (36 x 32 1/4 in.)

Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA

Shown from the hips up, a nude woman stands between a table in front of her and a clothed man behind her, against a deep landscape in this vertical painting. The man rests one hand on her shoulder and holds up a mirror with the other. The woman’s pale skin has a pronounced golden glow. Her body faces us and she looks to our left, holding her waist-length, curly, strawberry-blond hair with her right hand by her face. Her hair on the other side is tied back with a sage-green band behind her ear. She wears a sheer white sash wrapped around her back and upper arms. A muted rose-pink, velvet sash loops over her left forearm, to our left. That hand rests on a round, squat glass bottle that sits on a leaf-green table, with her index finger covering the opening of the bottle. She wears a gold ring with a small dark stone on her left ring finger, and another gold ring rests on the table. The back corner of the table covers her genitals in the lower right corner of the painting. Behind her and to our left, a man with an olive-toned complexion and short curly brown hair, moustache, and long beard looks down his long nose at the woman as he rests his left hand, to our right, on her shoulder. He has dark eyebrows, flushed cheeks, and his pink lips are closed. He wears a cranberry-red coat embroidered along the edges with gold. White ruffles encircle his neck and the cuff we can see. Almost lost in shadow, the hilt of his sword peeks around his hip. With his right hand, to our left, he holds up a dark rectangular object in a wood-colored frame. The reflections of his fingertips in the glass indicate that this is a mirror, but the surface is otherwise black. A dense, forest-green tree grows in the landscape behind the woman. The view over the man’s shoulder, to our left, has sea-green hills beneath a watery blue sky with cream-white clouds.

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Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866–1868, 1872–73
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 96.5 cm × 85.1 cm (38.0 in × 33.5 in)
Location: Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware

Rossetti first painted Lady Lilith in 1866–1868 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872–73 to show the face of Alexa Wilding, perhaps at the suggestion of his client, shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, who displayed the painting in his drawing room with five other Rossetti “stunners.” Sources disagree on whether Leyland or Rossetti initiated the repainting, but the major change was the substitution of Alexa Wilding’s face for Cornforth’s. The painting was returned to Rossetti in February 1872, and he completed the repainting on 2 December at Kelmscott Manor before returning it to Leyland.

The woman is combing her hair and watching herself on the hand held mirror. The first wife of Adam has a lot to think about and to contemplate while watching her own beauty on the mirror. The atmosphere of the picture is gloomy and totally inward. Lady Lilith is not interested in anything really, but herself. This morbid narcissism is totally captivating in the picture. It is after all, a picture of vanity. The simple act of combing the hair becomes an open door to the woman’s personality. Her naked shoulder is escaping from the gown and is a clear sign of the intense carnal aspect of the picture. Although she is not naked or half dressed, this may be even more powerful.

A study for Lady Lilith, 1866, in red chalk is in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Henry Treffry Dunn (Rossetti’s assistant), 1867

Medium: Watercolor and gouache (bodycolor)

Dimensions: 20 3/16 X 17 5/16 in. (51.3 x 44 cm)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

The picture shows the face of Cornforth. One of Rossetti’s assistants, Charles Fairfax Murray, who had created copies of his master’s work claimed that some paintings later attributed to Rossetti were actually painted by his assistants. Murray claimed that the Lady Lilith in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was painted by Henry Treffry Dunn and was just “touched up” by Rossetti.

Fascinated by women’s physical allure, Rossetti here imagines a legendary femme fatale as a self-absorbed nineteenth-century beauty who combs her hair and seductively exposes her shoulders. Nearby flowers symbolize different kinds of love. In Jewish literature, the enchantress Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife, and her character is underscored by lines from Goethe’s Faust attached by Rossetti to the original frame, “Beware . . . for she excels all women in the magic of her locks, and when she twines them round a young man’s neck, she will not ever set him free again.” The artist’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is the sitter in this watercolor, which Rossetti and his assistant Dunn based on an oil of 1866 (Delaware Art Museum).

This image is in the public domain.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Woman Braiding Her Hair, 1876
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions height: 55.5 cm (21.8 in)
National Gallery of Art , Washington DC, USA

A young woman with peachy skin shaded with ice blue and pale, mint green is shown from the chest up wearing a low-cut, white garment in this vertical portrait painting. The painting is created with blended brushstrokes, giving it a soft, blurred effect. The woman’s body is angled to our left and she looks off in that direction with blue eyes, her head tipped a little toward us. She has a straight nose and full, rosy pink lips. Thick, blond bangs sweep across her forehead, and her hair is partially pulled back. She holds one long lock with her left hand, on our right, in front of her shoulder. One small gold ball earring adorns the ear we can see. Her low-cut, white garment falls off her shoulders and is belted with a blue sash at her waist. The background is made up of a field of royal and turquoise blue behind her head and shoulders, and rust brown behind her body. The artist signed and dated the work with dark paint in the lower left corner: “Renoir.76.”

This image is in the public domain.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bather Arranging Her Hair, 1893
Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: overall: 92.4 × 74 cm (36 3/8 × 29 1/8 in.), framed: 110.2 x 94 cm (43 3/8 x 37 in.)

Collection: National Gallery of Art , Washington DC, USA

Shown from the knees up, a nearly nude, young woman with pale pink skin stands with her hands on her upswept, chestnut-brown hair in front of a pile of cloth, probably clothing, in this vertical painting. Blended brushstrokes give the painting a soft, almost blurred look. She stands with her body angled slightly to our left and her head tipped forward under her hands, which work in her hair. Her cheeks are flushed and her wide, pink lips are closed. Her round breasts are firm, and a piece of bright white fabric is bunched around her upper thighs below a smooth pubic area. Garments in the pile of fabric behind her are petal pink, vivid white, ruby red, and buttercup yellow. The area behind and around the woman and fabric is loosely painted with sage green, caramel brown, and golden yellow. Touches of yellow on a field of green to our right suggest grass and flowers. The artist signed the work with dark paint in the lower right corner: “Renoir.”

This image is in the public domain.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Woman Combing her Hair, 1907
Dimensions height: 43 cm (16.9 in); width: 36 cm (14.1 in)
Collection: San Diego Museum of Art

This artwork is in public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or less. 

Girl Combing Her Hair, Edvard Munch
Date: 1892
Media: oil, canvas
Location: Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen, Norway
Dimensions: 72.3 x 91.4 cm

I love the red, the fiery orange and dark yellows, in contrast with the cool colors of the window. There is a sense of transience in the picture, the young woman is ready to do something else, go out and enjoy life, open the window for good, this little ceremony is like the last thing she does before delivering herself to the world. She is ready to enjoy life, she does not have much time for brooding and contemplation, she gets the job done as required, but this is about it!  The unmistakable sign of this psychological posture is the fact that the woman is combing her hair being fully dressed and standing.

Woman Combing Her Hair before a Mirror, Edgar Degas, c. 1870-1875
Collection: Norton Simon Museum

More swiftly and richly painted than most Degas works of the 1870s, this scene of a woman combing her hair offers few clues to its subject’s identity. The artist returned again and again to the theme of women combing their hair—from backstage to brothel to bourgeois interior—capitalizing on the chance it provided to portray a figure absorbed in her task, seemingly unaware she is being observed. Degas painted this particular composition on top of an earlier picture, probably a portrait, which he turned upside down before beginning anew. The left ear of the hidden sitter remains visible in the curve of the figure’s waist.

Woman Combing Her Hair, Edgar Degas, ca. 1888–90

Medium: Pastel on light green wove paper, now discolored to warm gray, affixed to original pulpboard mount

Dimensions: 24 1/8 x 18 1/8 in. (61.3 x 46 cm)

Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

This is the second of two variants of a composition that Degas created about 1885 (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). In this version, he used a new technique, applying pastel in so many successive layers that the pigment became burnished and the underlying paper rubbed to such an extent that the fibers were loosened and now project from the surface like many little hairs. Degas also emphasized anti-natural chartreuses and greens in modeling the figure’s pink flesh, perhaps inspired by the play of complementary color contrasts in the work of such younger contemporaries as Seurat or Van Gogh.

Degas, Women combing their hair , 1875-6

Dimensions: 12 3/4 x 18 1/8 in.; 32.385 x 46.0375 cm
Oil on paper mounted on canvas

The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, USA

For Degas, whose oeuvre mostly dates from the 1860s to around 1900, Women Combing Their Hair from the mid-1870s is a fairly early work and the earliest by the artist in The Phillips Collection. It shows one of the first manifestations of a subject that would occupy him throughout his career, culminating in dramatic late pastels. The awkward poses women assume in the privacy of their boudoir whether bathing or grooming themselves engaged Degas endlessly and became a perennial subject central to his work.

In this painting executed in oil on paper, Degas shows three views of a young woman combing her hair. She stands, her long tresses hanging down the right side of her body; she is seated on a chair with her hair thrown over her head, and she sits on the ground, combing it over to the left side of her head. Barefoot and dressed in a chemise, she could be moving about her dressing room, but Degas completed the image by giving it a landscape setting, presumably a pure invention and one that unites the figures in time and space. The three positions suggest the model’s movement and the artist’s movement around her. In so doing, the work goes to the heart of an approach that would absorb the artist for the rest of his life, the challenge of conveying movement.

Duncan Phillips appreciated Degas’ fusion of influences, including that of Japanese prints which often show women absorbed in private pursuits. Phillips’ purchase of this work in 1940 inaugurated the decade in which he made his most important purchases of the artist’s work.

Edgar Degas, ‘Femme se peignant’, c.1887-1890, Charcoal and red and brown chalk on tracing paper laid down on board, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax from the estate of Stephen Brod and allocated to Pallant House Gallery, 2016) 

This drawing by Edgar Degas was once owned by Gladys Deacon, an American socialite whose beauty inspired authors, royalty and artists alike.

Deacon was a prolific collector during the early 20th century, owning works by artists including Rodin, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Marcel Proust once wrote of her “I never saw a girl with such beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.” And with such a lot of works by Impressionists, it seems!

Combing the Hair (‘La Coiffure’), Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, about 1896
Medium and support: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 114.3 × 146.7 cm

The National Gallery, London, UK

Women combing their hair, or having it combed, often appear in Degas’s work, and this painting is one of his boldest treatments of the subject. A maid, wearing her servant’s uniform, combs the hair of her seated mistress, who is not yet fully dressed. Pulled back by the force of the strokes, the mistress raises her right hand to her head as if to steady herself or hold her hair in place.

The composition is sketched in with bold sweeps of the brush, and Degas mainly limits the colours to variations of a fiery orange-red painted over a creamy white ground, which is still visible on the left of the canvas. Some areas are more defined than others – the objects on the table, for example, look unfinished. Degas probably planned to work further on the painting, but it was never completed and remained in his studio. After his death, it was bought by Henri Matisse.

Skye Sherwin wrote in the Guardian:

Degas takes his viewers into hidden worlds, into bathrooms, boudoirs or backstage at the ballet. However, his approach is far from tell-all. “There must always be some mystery left,” he said. Here we are left to guess at the relationship: is this a maid, mother or madam?

Alice in the mirror
Balthus (Balthasar Klossovsky de Rola), 1933, 162×112 cm

Collection: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, dit), La Toilette de Cathy

octobre 1933 – décembre 1933

Collection: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

lnspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the composition intertwines literary and autobiographical reminiscences.

Balthus transposes in the characters of Cathy and Heathcliff his own frustrated relationship with Antoinette de Watteville. The unreality that emerges from this intimate scene and particularly form the white body of Cathy incites to see in the duo formed by the young lady and her housemaid a memorial expression of Heathcliff-Balthus melancholic rumination. The canvas is presented in 1934 at the Galerie Pierre, in an exhibition that launched Balthus’ career and was praised by many, in particular by Antonin Artaud.

“Scene of combing hair” (髪梳き), a 1977 (Shōwa 52) kappazuri-e / stencil print, by 20th century Japanese sōsaku-hanga (創作版画, creative prints) artist Mori Yoshitoshi (森義利, 1898-1992) who specialised in such pictures.