Degas was drawn to the pastel medium because it provides both rich color and spontaneous line in the same stroke and can be worked and re-worked to create complex textures. Here, the viewer’s glimpse of a bather awash in the soft morning light suggests an immediacy that appealed to Degas, who wanted to capture the transitory quality of modern life. 

When he displayed this pastel along with others of women bathing and drying themselves at the final Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, its uncompromising realism provoked a tirade of negative criticism, resulting in the popular subtitle "la boulangère" (the baker's wife), deriding the model’s unfashionably plump figure.