According to an anecdote recounted by the collector and friend of the artist Alexis Rouart, Degas began this important etching after being compelled to stay the night at his friend’s home due to freezingweather. The next morning he requested a copper plate and sketched the first state of Le sortie du bain. While he quickly established the essential elements, the woman getting out of the bath with a servantholding a towel to receive her, Degas continued to develop the composition through a series of minor alterations and adjustments in a total of twenty-two states, the largest number of any of his prints.

‘What is most remarkable about the twenty-two states of this image is the ebb and flow of light and dark as Degas continued to work on this plate, not only adding lines and…passages of aquatint, but also repeatedly burnishing out certain areas and then adding lines and tones back into them’ (S. Lees, R. R. Brettell, Innovative Impressions, Prints by Cassatt, Degas and Pissarro, Tulsa, Oklahoma, p. 49 and 52).

These often subtle changes include the addition of patterns to the walls, rug, and armchair in the foreground. This widely exhibited unique impression of the eighteenth state is the most articulate of the twenty-two states, with each individual element defined, revealing the subject with the clarity and beauty. The ripples of the water in the bath have been delicately suggested with drypoint, and the shapes of the armchair in the background and the mantlepiece at right are more clearly discernible from the heavily patterned interior, as is the figure of the bather, now lightened with burnishing to create the soft effect of light on the bather's skin.

In the subsequent states Degas's relentless experimentation leads to a some over-worked composition, culminating in the twenty-second, final state, in which he 'burnished much of the drypoint tone of the previous state, leaving the composition unresolved' (Reed & Shapiro, p. 130), at which point the artist ceased to work on the plate.