O tepidário

Chasseriau built this warm-room scene from a memory. He had visited the ruins of Pompeii in 1840 and never forgot them, and here, showing the painting at the Salon of 1853, he reconstructs a tepidarium, the heated room where Roman women rested and dried off between baths. The setting borrows from a bath complex only recently dug out of the ash. He fills it with a crowd of nude and draped figures arranged in two balanced groups under a long vaulted ceiling. Trained by Ingres, he gives the bodies a smooth, cool polish. The critic Theophile Gautier praised it as an antique fresco lifted straight off a Pompeian wall, which was exactly the ancient world Chasseriau wanted his visitors to feel they had walked into.