After the Bath

By 1894 Bouguereau was 69, a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 1876 and a fixture of the Salon jury, and his nudes were selling mainly to American buyers, who paid better than the French did. The impressionists were by then an ordinary fact of Paris life. He carried on exactly as before, working the surface until the brushwork disappeared.

The subject is the oldest one he had, a woman drying herself after bathing, treated as smooth academic figure painting with no story attached, at just over a metre and a half tall.

It now hangs a long way from any of that, in Recife on the north-east coast of Brazil, in the museum built by the industrialist Ricardo Brennand, where it is the centrepiece of his European painting collection.