The Half-Length Bather

Ingres painted this in Rome in 1807. He had won the Prix de Rome and was living at the Villa Medici as a state-funded student, obliged to send finished works back to Paris each year to prove he was progressing. This was one of them, and one of his first female nudes. He had trained under Jacques-Louis David but was already pulling away from him, toward the smooth, cool surfaces that became his own. There is a strange split in the picture. The striped turban is described with plain realism, while the woman's broad back is simplified almost to an abstract curve. A year later he reworked the same idea, larger, into the painting now known as the Valpinçon Bather.