The Toilette of Esther

Théodore Chassériau was a prodigy, a pupil of Ingres who exhibited at the Salon as a teenager, and he painted this when he was only 22, in 1841. The subject comes from the Book of Esther, the moment the Jewish heroine is being dressed and adorned before she is presented to the Persian king Ahasuerus, who will make her his queen. Chassériau shows her nude to the waist, raising her arms to her hair, a servant in blue at one side and the eunuch Hegai in red offering a jewel box at the other. When it went to the Salon of 1842, critics did not know what to make of it, a biblical story treated with this much frank sensuality. You can feel him caught between his teacher Ingres and the warmer, more sensuous Romanticism of Delacroix. A relative left the painting to the Louvre in 1934.