An Old Man's Last Fantasy: Ingres and the Circle of Bathers

In 1862, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres put his final brush to a painting he had been shaping since at least 1852. He was around eighty-two years old, and rather than hide his age he inscribed it directly onto the work: AETATIS LXXXII — at age 82. He wanted the irony noticed. Years later, in 1867, he told acquaintances he still carried 'all the fire of a man of thirty years.' The painting he made at that advanced age was Le Bain turc, The Turkish Bath — a dense, circular composition of nude women crowded around a pool inside an imagined harem.

Ingres had not started from nothing. He reused figures he had drawn or painted decades earlier as single nudes — bathers and odalisques lifted from his own back catalogue and rearranged into a crowd. The central figure, playing a long-necked instrument likely a saz or bağlama, is almost identical to the woman in his 1808 Valpinçon Bather. A woman in the background holding a cup resembles his sitter from the 1856 portrait of Madame Moitessier. Another, arms raised above her head, echoes an 1818 sketch of his own wife, Delphine Ramel, though her pose is subtly altered. Other bodies, tucked into shadowed corners of the canvas, were borrowed from engravings in a seventeenth-century book called Histoire générale des Turcs.

Originally the canvas was rectangular. But at some point Ingres converted it into a tondo — a circular format — which pulled the composition tighter and gave the viewer the sensation of peering through a keyhole or an oculus at something private. A photograph taken by Charles Marville survives showing the painting in its earlier rectangular state, before this transformation.

The painting's atmosphere depends on pale, almost bloodless skin tones — whites shading into pink, ivory, grey and brown — paired with motifs meant to signal the Orient: vases, running water, fruit, jewels, the implied haze of perfume. Yet Ingres himself never traveled beyond Europe, unlike his contemporary Eugène Delacroix, who had actually visited an Algerian harem. The women in Ingres's bath look more Caucasian and European than Middle Eastern or North African. For him, the setting was less an ethnographic study than a pretext — a socially acceptable wrapper for painting the female nude in a passive, sexual arrangement.

His fascination with this fantasy had deep roots. On his way to Italy in 1806, Ingres copied into his notebooks a florid passage describing the baths of a sultan's seraglio, where women attended a sultana's bathing body. In 1825 he transcribed a passage from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters from the Orient, describing the women's bath at Adrianople in 1716 — two hundred naked women, some talking, some drinking coffee or sorbet, young slave girls braiding hair into elaborate shapes. Montagu's letters had been reprinted eight times in France between 1763 and 1857, feeding a broader European appetite for imagined Eastern interiors. Critics have since noted that Ingres's finished bath bears little real resemblance to the public scene Montagu described.