Moorish Bath (painting)

Moorish Bath
ArtistJean-Léon Gérôme
Year1870
MediumOil on canvas, genre painting
Dimensions50.8 cm × 40.6 cm (20.0 in × 16.0 in)
LocationMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston

Moorish Bath is an 1870 Orientalist genre painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.[1] It depicts a scene in a Turkish Bath somewhere in the Middle East, featuring a woman likely to be a Circassian and an African attendant.[2]

The painting was exhibited at the 1873 World Fair held in Vienna.Today it is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, having been acquired in 1924.[3] A print based on the picture was produced by the engraver Charles Courtry in 1874.[4]

Inspired by his 1868 trip to Egypt, Gérôme produced a number of scenes of Oriental bathhouses over the next twenty years of which this was the first. These offered an opportunity to contrast a more exotic model with the traditional Academic nude. Another larger, similarly, themed-work Moorish Bath is now in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. [5]

References

Bibliography

  • Allan, Scott & Morton, Mary G. Reconsidering Gérôme. Getty Publications, 2010.
  • Ackerman, Gerald M. The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Sotheby's Publications, 1986.
  • Facos, Michelle. An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art. Taylor & Francis, 2011.
  • Slimmon, Ann H & Singsen, Judith A. (ed.) European Painting and Sculpture, Ca. 1770-1937, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.