The Valpinçon Bather

A woman sits on the edge of a bed with her back to us, a turban on her head, the sheets folded around her. Ingres painted her in Rome in 1808, and the critics did not like her. Fifty years later she was a masterpiece.

The story behind the painting

Ingres painted this canvas in 1808 while he was studying at the French Academy in Rome. He was in his late twenties, and he had already painted a smaller female nude a year earlier, the Bathing Woman of 1807, also seen from behind. This larger work is widely regarded as his first great treatment of the nude. It was first called simply Seated Woman. The name we use today came later, from one of its nineteenth-century owners, the Valpinçon family. In French it is also known as La Grande Baigneuse. The Louvre has held it since 1879.

What to look for

Look at how much of the picture is about the back: the turn of the neck, the long curve of the spine, the legs folded at the edge of the bed. The fall of a metallic green drapery, the swell of the white curtain in front of her and the folds of the sheets and linen all echo those curves. Then notice what cools them down: the pale, even tone of the skin and the elegant black-veined marble on the left. The critic Robert Rosenblum wrote that the figure seems to float weightlessly on the enamel smoothness of the surface, as if time, movement and even gravity were suspended.

Meaning and intent

Compared with the 1807 Bathing Woman, this painting leaves out the overt sexuality and offers instead a calm, measured sensuality. Charles Baudelaire spoke of the model's deep voluptuousness, yet in many ways she is presented as chaste, and that tension runs through the whole picture: the curves invite, the cool flesh and marble hold back. We never see her face. She is turned away and absorbed in her own quiet moment, which leaves the viewer looking at a private stillness rather than at a person who looks back.

Legacy

The painting was not well received when it was first exhibited. Almost fifty years later, when Ingres was famous, the Goncourt brothers wrote that Rembrandt himself would have envied the amber colour of this pale torso, and the Louvre calls it a masterpiece of harmonious lines and delicate light. Ingres returned to this figure many times, up to The Turkish Bath of 1863, whose mandolin player in the foreground echoes her. Man Ray's 1924 photograph Le violon d'Ingres was inspired by it, and Herman Braun-Vega referred to it more than twenty times, once placing her on a modest Peruvian beach.