拔示巴

Gerome painted this in 1889 at Bougival, just outside Paris, and he did it on a rooftop of his own. His summer studio there had an open terrace screened by trees and shrubs, arranged so he could pose a nude model outdoors in real daylight, away from prying eyes. The subject fit the setting exactly. It is the biblical Bathsheba washing on the flat roof of her house, seen from behind as she cleans her arm, a servant crouched at her feet. Up on a higher terrace stands the small figure of King David, leaning out to watch her, the glimpse that the story says undid him. Seven years later Gerome reworked the same figure as a sculpture.