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The Turkish Bath is the last major painting Ingres completed, made when he was eighty-two and already famous. It shows a group of nude women in a circular steam room, some bathing, some reclining, some playing music, with a pool of water in the foreground and a domed ceiling above. The composition is a tondo - a circle - and the figures are arranged around its edge so that the eye travels continuously around the room.
Ingres built the painting out of figures he had used before: the bather in the foreground is taken from the Valpincon Bather of 1808, the reclining woman at the right from the Grande Odalisque, and several others from drawings made decades earlier. The result is a kind of retrospective, a summation of a lifetime’s study of the female body. The light is soft and diffuse, the colour is warm and muted, and the whole scene has the stillness of a dream.
The painting was made in 1862 and first shown in 1863, when it was bought by Prince Napoleon, who asked Ingres to cut it down from a rectangle to a circle. It entered the Louvre in 1929 and is one of the museum’s most popular nineteenth-century works.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) painted The Turkish Bath at the age of eighty-two, four years before his death. He had been drawing bathers and odalisques since his student years in Rome, and the painting gathers those studies into a single composition. He was, by then, the most honoured painter in France, a senator and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour.
The Turkish Bath belongs to the European fashion for Orientalist imagery that followed the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt and the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. Ingres never travelled to the Middle East; his Orient was a construction, built from travel books, engravings and the work of other painters. The painting’s circular format and its frank sensuality made it controversial in 1863, and it was one of the works that later appealed to Picasso and Matisse.
Richelieu Wing · Level 2 · French Paintings, 19th Century
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
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