El gran baño de Brusa

By 1885 Gérôme had been travelling to the Ottoman world for a decade, and the public back in Paris couldn't get enough of these interiors. This one sends you inside the caldarium of the New Baths at Bursa, a bathhouse finished in 1552 under the great Ottoman architect Sinan. Gérôme had sketched the real building on a visit in 1879, so the octagonal pool, the tiled walls, the light falling from the dome are closely observed. The bathers, though, are the studio and the fantasy talking. What he was really selling to Salon visitors was distance itself, a place they would never go, painted with the polish of a photograph. It hung at the Salon of 1885, where critics called it about the finest of all his bath scenes.