No doubt Degas intended to include this work in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition among the nudes he described in the catalogue as women bathing, washing themselves, combing their hair or having it combed, since it is his only pastel of the mid-1880s of a woman having her hair combed. Executed in large format and meticulously finished, this nude-reminiscent of Rembrandt's famous?Bathsheba at Her Bath?in the Louvre-may not have been completed in time for the exhibition, or else it may have been excluded deliberately for reasons unknown.�