Die Badende von Valpinçon

Ingres painted this in 1808 as a student, far from home. He had won the top prize of the French academy and was living in Rome on the scholarship, required each year to send a piece back to Paris to prove he was working. This was one of those exercises. It is nothing like a busy academy showpiece. A woman sits on the edge of a bed with her back to us, a white cloth over her lap, a striped curtain and a small fountain the only other things in the room. We never see her face. Ingres turns her away and lets the light run smoothly down her back and shoulder, and the whole painting becomes about that long calm curve of skin. His teachers in Paris were not impressed at first. Only decades later, once he was famous, did people call it beautiful. The writer Edmond de Goncourt said Rembrandt himself would have envied the warm color of that pale back. Ingres kept returning to this same figure for the rest of his life. She reappears, more than 50 years on, among the crowd of his last great nude, The Turkish Bath. It has hung in the Louvre since 1879, named after a collector who once owned it.