Piscina in un harem

Gérôme painted this around 1875 on commission for the future Tsar Alexander III, and it is pure Orientalist fantasy. A nude woman is attended by a servant beside a still pool in a tiled bathhouse, the marble, the smoke of a water pipe, the blue faience all rendered with Gérôme's cool, photographic finish. He had travelled in Egypt and Turkey, but a scene like this was invented for a European buyer, not observed. Its later history is stranger than its subject. In March 2001 the canvas was cut from its frame and stolen from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and it stayed missing for almost six years before turning up in Moscow, crumpled and damaged, in 2006. Restored, it hangs again in the Hermitage.