浴室

Stevens was a Belgian who made his name in Paris painting the fashionable women of the Second Empire, and around 1867 he set one of them in her bath. She is a demi-mondaine, a kept woman of the Parisian demimonde, and she looks anything but content, lying back in the warm water with a distracted, faraway air. Stevens fills the scene with modern comforts and quiet hints. A tap curves over the tub in the shape of a swan's neck, a sly nod to the myth of Leda, and in her hand she holds a letter along with a pair of white roses, the small traces of a love affair. Behind the taps a fixture is moulded like a scallop shell, part of the comfortable, up-to-date room this private moment plays out in.