Image · Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Romantic · Painting
The Turkish Bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1862
ArtistJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Date1862
TypePainting
MediumOil on canvas mounted on wood
Dimensions108 cm diameter (42.5 in)
LocationDenon Wing
— The Work
About this masterpiece
Painted when Ingres was eighty-two, this circular tondo depicts a tangle of nude female bathers in an imaginary Ottoman harem. The picture distills a lifetime of Ingres’s nudes — sinuous backs, impossible anatomies, a feverish concentration on female flesh — into a single dreamlike vision viewed as if through a peephole.
— Context
Historical significance
Originally rectangular, the painting was reworked into a circle to soften its erotic charge. It is widely seen as the culmination of 19th-century French Orientalism and a summation of Ingres’s career-long obsession with the female nude.
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