A Lady at her Toilet

In Paris around 1717, the models posing at the Royal Academy's life class were all men. So Watteau and his friend the Comte de Caylus, a wealthy amateur of the arts, hired women themselves and drew them in a room they rented for the purpose. The woman seated on this bed comes out of one of those sessions, and Watteau's drawing of her from life is now in the British Museum.

What made the picture unusual was the setting. She is caught in an ordinary, passing moment, slipping a chemise on or off while her maid holds out a gown, with no goddess or myth to account for her nakedness. The bed, on the other hand, is invented. Watteau built it partly from the bed in Rembrandt's Danaë, a painting that was probably already in Paris by then. This is one of only three pictures of its kind by him known to survive, because near the end of his life he asked for such works to be destroyed.