Depois do Banho

Gerome built a career on scenes like this, a woman drying herself after a Turkish bath, caught in a moment of hushed private ritual. He had travelled the Near East from the 1850s, up the Nile and through Cairo, and came home with a painter's memory for real tilework, marble and inlaid brass. The setting looks convincingly eastern, but he assembled it in his Paris studio, and the nude follows classical proportion rather than anything he had seen. That blend of documentary architecture and invented figure was precisely what nineteenth-century French buyers wanted, and Gerome, also a sculptor and a powerful teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, supplied it for decades.