In the mid-1870s Degas began a sustained exploration of monotype printmaking, soon treating the inked impressions as experimental grounds for drawing and later pastel—an important step toward his hybrid late technique.
By 1876 Degas was making works that combine monotype’s dark tonal structure with pastel on top, exploiting the printed blacks/greys as a scaffold for luminous color and rapid mark-making.
Around 1877–1879 Degas produced brothel-interior monotypes, often using gestural manipulation of wet ink (wiping, scraping, fingerprints) and sometimes adding pastel—pushing monotype toward an expressive, painterly graphic language.
Degas exhibited monotype-based pastel scenes of modern entertainment (e.g., works associated with Les Ambassadeurs), demonstrating how printed ink grounds could intensify lighting effects and atmosphere under pastel.
After about 1880, Degas increasingly relied on pastel for its immediacy and color intensity, a shift often linked to his deteriorating eyesight and to his search for techniques suited to studio-based work.
Degas exhibited Dancer Aged 14 in 1881 (modelled earlier), using wax and real materials (hair, fabrics) and a display vitrine—parallel to his pastel practice in its tactile, materially experimental approach.
In the 1870s–1880s Degas developed methods of building many pastel layers—often fixing between applications—and also experimented with moistening pastel (including steam) to create a manipulable paste for impasto-like effects.
In 1886 Degas exhibited a group of bather pastels at the Eighth (final) Impressionist Exhibition; these works were noted for radical viewpoints and for a dense, worked surface that exploited pastel’s capacity for layered color and line.
By 1888, bather pastels formed a recognizable body of work circulated through the market, underscoring Degas’s sustained engagement with the theme as a vehicle for formal experimentation and serial variation.
Around 1890 Degas developed a more complex tracing process for larger works: pinning tracing paper over an existing image, copying and altering it, and repeating the cycle—supporting his late practice of reworking motifs through successive states.
Degas sought fixatives that would not darken tones or add unwanted shine; research on his practice points to a fixative developed with his friend Luigi Chialiva, supporting repeated superimposed layers while preserving a matte surface.
Works from the early–mid 1890s (e.g., After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself, 1890–1895) exemplify Degas’s late pastel handling: numerous layers, controlled fixation, and emphasis on bodies as volumes built from superimposed color.
Degas repeatedly combined opaque pastel with more transparent media (watercolor, charcoal underdrawing), varying pressure, blending, and tools (e.g., stumps) to create contrasts between crisp lines, rubbed passages, and dense color masses.
Museum accounts of Degas’s pastels emphasize two late innovations: pastel on monotype for tonal structure, and pastel on tracing paper in successive layers, using fixative to superimpose layers without muddying—preserving brightness and texture.
By the early 1900s, Degas’s pastel technique often foregrounded the medium itself—bold, calligraphic strokes, vibrating color, and heavily worked surfaces—reflecting a late style that could verge on abstraction while retaining dancer motifs.
By about 1910, Degas’s mature pastel practice—serial reworking, tracing-paper transfers, repeated fixation, and aggressive surface manipulation (including moistening/steam in some accounts)—had become a fully developed late technique influential on later drawing and print/pastel hybridity.
Pastel Innovations and Degas's Late Technique (1875–1910)
