Women Bathing

This comes from France, from the circle of painters working at the royal château of Fontainebleau in the last years of the sixteenth century. Around 1595 the French court had a taste for one very particular subject: elegant women at their bath, shown half-length in a tub draped with white linen. The fashion reached back to King Francis I earlier in the century, who had made bathing part of court life and brought Italian artists north to decorate his palace. The cool, porcelain skin and the careful, slightly artificial poses also show how much these French painters had taken from Flemish art. The type is the same one behind the famous Louvre double portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her sister in the bath. The name of the painter has not come down to us.