La piccola bagnante; Interno di harem

Ingres first painted a woman seen from behind in 1808, when he was a young man in Rome, and he never really let her go. This small canvas from 1828 is her again, 20 years on. The same smooth back, the same turban, only now she is seated at the edge of a bed inside a bath-house, other women washing behind her, one lowering herself into a basin of water. It is a European daydream of the harem, a subject much in fashion in Paris at the time, painted by a man who had never seen one. Ingres cared less about the East than about that back. He would fold the very same figure into his last great picture, the crowded Turkish Bath, more than 30 years after this one.