This pretty negligee of a blonde woman doing her hair is striking at first glance because of the contrast in colour between the white of the bathrobe, just half-open on her breast, and the warm colours of the sofa on which she is sitting.

The refined and sensual interior of the painter’s studio – the sun embroidered on a black cushion of the divan, the delicate arch of the back of the black chair (so often painted), the oriental printed fabrics – are thus opposed to the white drapery of the robe, modest and luminous, which only hints at the curve of the model’s torso and legs.

But the orthogonality of the space, the rectangular structures of the gilded frames, the chair placed symmetrically to the model, weave a network where the model, arms raised in a diamond shape, resolves to let the painter’s eye freeze her beauty.

The power of the artist’s pictorial creation transforms the beauty of an ephemeral moment enclosed in the cocoon of reality into an eternally frozen image that will unfold in our dreams.