The Turkish Bath

Ingres signed and dated this in 1862, when he was 82, and he was proud enough of that to write his age on it in Latin. He had never been to a harem or an Ottoman bath. His whole picture of it came from a book, the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an Englishwoman who had described the women's baths in Constantinople a century and a half earlier. Ingres had carried that description around and reused these nude poses across his career, and here he crowded a lifetime of them into one room. The painting started out rectangular. An early owner, a cousin of the emperor, sent it back, reportedly because his wife was offended, and Ingres then cut it down into the round tondo you see now, which packs the bodies even more tightly. The woman playing a stringed instrument with her back to us, at the center, repeats a figure he had painted decades before.