La Circassienne au Bain

Merry-Joseph Blondel finished this life-sized bathing nude in 1814, a polished piece of neoclassical taste, a young Circassian woman set in an imagined antiquity. What makes it worth talking about is how it ended. Almost a century later, in April 1912, the painting was aboard the Titanic, shipped by a young Swedish heir travelling first class. He survived the sinking. The canvas did not. When the insurance claims were filed the following year, his demand of 100,000 dollars for the lost picture was the single largest claim made against the White Star Line for any one item carried on the ship, worth a few million in today's money. No photograph of it is known to survive, so what it actually looked like we reconstruct from the title and a handful of written descriptions.