Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 'Peasant Girls bathing in the Sea at Dusk', about 1875-76

This magnificent but unfinished picture stayed in Degas’s studio all his life. It was kept alive with constant overpainting and changes of mind, one of the many experiments that led him from his classical training to the forefront of nineteenth-century Modernism.

Three dark silhouettes cut across the picture surface as choppy seawater crashes around their naked bodies. They hold hands like a chain of paper dolls, moving in jerky yet dance-like steps towards the setting sun. One figure leans forward with rigid legs pressed together. A second wades carefully through the waves, reaching out for balance. The third arches back and throws up her head at the thrill of the sudden cold. We can almost feel the chill of the rough sea as it splashes against them, holding them motionless for a second, taking their breath away. Behind these figures is a cluster of people in Degas’s more familiar poses. A woman sits on a jetty deep in thought. Another figure rubs their head with a towel.

Clearest of all stands an early version of the many images Degas made of a woman combing her hair. This ritual came from Japanese prints showing elegant young women combing their long hair or having it dressed by a servant. He repeats the theme in a very different mood in the sunlit Beach Scene (National Gallery, London), made around the same time. There, a little girl sprawls on the sand fully clothed while her nursemaid combs her sea-tangled hair.

Framed by the arms of the figures on the left, the painting becomes a tiny seascape. A sailboat sets off from the jetty while a busy little steamer belches smoke. This section owes much to Claude Monet’s Thames below Westminster and even to J.M.W. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire (both National Gallery, London). Both show modern vessels together with old ones against a setting sun. Degas visited London and would surely have seen Turner’s great painting.

Degas sketched seascapes on the coast of Normandy in summer 1869. This unfinished, heavily reworked painting was probably made a number of years later in his Paris studio. He combined elements from those earlier studies with bold composition and unusual techniques. The unconventional appearance, shifts in scale and broad treatment make this one of Degas’s most progressive works of the mid-1870s.

Even in its unfinished state, Degas planned to exhibit his Peasant Girls. The painting is included in catalogues for both the Second and Third Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris (1876–7). Yet no critic in either year commented on what would have been one of the most daring works on view. Degas appears to have withdrawn it on both occasions at the last minute. We do not known the reason. But Paul Gauguin saw it at some point and responded with his perhaps less challenging Women Bathing (National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo).

Degas believed in the power of memory in painting. He kept a second picture in his studio, reworking it but also leaving it unfinished. This was Young Spartans Exercising. Adolescents gathered from the streets of Montmartre acted as models for that work. Perhaps sketches made for that picture brought back memories of their vitality and lack of inhibition. This allowed him to create the stunning impact of arrested movement we see in Peasant Girls.