The Turkish Bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) · 1862 (begun 1859)
Two dozen naked women crowd the steam of a hammam: one plays a stringed instrument with her back turned, others doze, drink coffee, embrace, dance at the rear, or simply stare out. The round format turns the scene into something glimpsed through a keyhole or a telescope, and that is part of the design. Ingres based the setting on the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who described the women's baths of Istanbul in 1717, and he copied passages of her text into his notebooks.
The musician in the foreground is a reworking of the Valpinçon Bather that Ingres had painted more than fifty years earlier, and other figures recycle poses he had used across his whole career. The picture is therefore an anthology of his own obsessions, assembled at the age of eighty-two. Bodies interlock like pieces of a puzzle, lit evenly so that no single figure dominates, and the flesh is polished to a uniform ivory. It began as a rectangle: you can still detect where the corners were painted out when he cut it down to a tondo in 1862.
Prince Napoléon bought it in 1859 and returned it almost at once, reportedly because his wife found it indecent. The dealer Khalil Bey, an Ottoman diplomat who also owned Courbet's L'Origine du monde, acquired it next. The Louvre bought the picture in 1911. Be aware that it hangs in the Sully wing, not with the large Denon canvases, so allow time to cross the museum if you want to see the Grande Odalisque and this together.
Did You Know? Ingres signed it with his age, aetatis LXXXII, as if daring anyone to believe an octogenarian had painted something so charged.
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