The Turkish bath

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The Turkish bath (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
The Turkish bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , 1862
Oil painting , canvas mounted on wood
108 × 110 cm
Louvre , Paris

The Turkish bath (French original title: Le Bain turc ) is a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , which he began at the end of the 1850s and completed in revision in 1862. It belongs to his late work and shows about 20 naked women from an oriental harem relaxing in a Turkish bath and enjoying themselves on sofas with music and coffee. The picture belongs to the collection of the Louvre in Paris and is in the Sully Pavilion , 2nd floor , room 940.

Description and interpretation

The picture with the dimensions 108 × 110 cm originally had a rectangular format, but Ingres reworked it into a round picture ( tondo ). In 1862 Ingres signed it with the words “J. Ingres Pinxt. MDCCCLXII Aetatis LXXXII ". It shows a little over 20 naked women, mostly with jewelry that puts the nudity into perspective, who are in an oriental-style interior that is arranged around a pool of water. A woman in the background is dancing to the music of another front view from the back, who plays a kind of lute , a so-called tchégour . Two women caress each other, which can be understood as an erotic allusion. Others loll around, doze off, or lie bored on couches. The group is served by girls, some of whom are dark-skinned, who serve coffee and offer scents and spices.

The female figures can be divided into two groups, background and foreground figures. The people in the foreground, in a slightly brighter light, are not always shown anatomically very precisely. Here sits the painterly highlighted musician in the center. She is the same person, in the same back view as in Ingres' famous painting La Baigneuse de Valpinçon (in the Louvre), already in a monumentalization of the figure. Also in the foreground is the affectionate couple and two people who take no notice. The shape of the figures in their arrangement and composition have the character of human arabesques . The subdued lighting of the painting underlines the lines of the woman's body, is intended to weaken their modeling but emphasize the surface of the light skin. The composition is based on the golden ratio , in keeping with the zeitgeist of the transfiguration of ancient beauty .

At the time when the dream of the Orient was widespread in French society, the painting represents a connection between European nudes and the longing for the Orient. Ingres' work contains many pictures on this subject. The artist worked on it for 50 years, and this painting, which was revealing according to the norms of the time, represents the high point of his late work, in which he once again quoted his earlier works extensively. Ingres, like his role model Raffael for religious motifs, chose the tondo as a picture frame. But he also enlarged the canvas, stretched it on wooden boards, changed and added details until his signature in 1862, such as the figure lying half in the water in the background.

History and background

Photograph of the first rectangular version by Charles Marville , 1859
Study by Ingres for his Turkish bath; the woman in the right foreground has three arms (oil on paper)

The painter, who has never been to the Orient, was inspired by the letters and reports of Mary Wortley Montagu , who between 1716 and 1718 had the opportunity to visit a women's bath in Constantinople and reports on the baths of the Seraglio of Mohammed. Ingres repeated many of his earlier nudes in this painting, which he rearranged to form this composition. Among them are his well-known works such as La baigneuse, dite Valpinçon , a nude from the back from 1808, La petite baigneuse , also a view from the back (1828) and La Grande Odalisque , a woman's body with a three-quarter profile as an odalisque , looking at the viewer, from 1814.

Apparently a harem scene from Anatole Demidoff di San Donato was ordered from Ingres as early as 1848 or 1852 , but it was finally bought by Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte , a cousin of the later Emperor Napoléon III. Ingres completed the first version of the commissioned picture in 1859 in a rectangular format and had it delivered to the prince, who, however, soon returned it, probably due to the intervention of his shocked wife Clotilde, and received an early self-portrait from Ingres in exchange. After the revision to a tondo and additions with further details such as another figure, ornaments, lighting, it came to the Turkish diplomat and art collector Halil Şerif Pascha , who also collected erotica for 32,000 francs. Hidden in his private collection, the picture remained unknown and did not cause a scandal later, such as Manet's painting The Breakfast in the Green from 1863, which was shown to the public shortly after completion. It then came into the collection of Constant Say, then to the Prince Amédée de Broglie. This last masterpiece from Ingres' late work was only shown publicly long after his death, on the occasion of an Ingres retrospective in the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1905. The Société des Amis du Louvre proposed it as a gift, financed by the industrialist, art collector and patron Maurice Fenaille , submitted for the Louvre, but the board of directors rejected the work twice. It was not until the Munich State Painting Collections expressed their interest that the Louvre accepted the gift in 1911.

reception

The French psychiatrist Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (1875–1953) diagnosed the figures in the picture, after all the painter's favorite type of woman, with an underactive thyroid , which would cause the full shape of the woman's body. The consequences are "very strong neck, passive gentleness of a face with full cheeks, thick lips, large velvet eyes without shine, very round and fat arms, shoulders completely embedded in flesh." The woman in the very front right is said to be Ingres' wife Madeleine act, which he sketched in 1818. Some critics used drastic metaphors to disapprove of the portrayal of women. Even Paul Claudel (1868-1955) did not take from there. But there were also admirers. On the occasion of the exhibition of the picture in the Paris Autumn Salon in 1905, Picasso and other modern artists found the motif of naked women in the bathroom apparently impressive. Edgar Degas even wanted to present it at the next world exhibition.

In 1911, the German art historian Albert Dreyfus (1876–1945) wrote about Ingres and this work in the journal Die Kunst :

“'The Turkish Bath' […] is like a final crowning embodiment of his youthful pictures, the 'Bathers' from 1806 and 1808. Here, the problem that occupied him all his life is finally solved: Ancient calm in an oriental garb. All bathers and odalisques are like preliminary studies for the picture he painted at an advanced age. The Turkish bath has the soft, limb-relaxing atmosphere that it needs in order to fully enjoy the beauty of women. "

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1905: On the occasion of the Ingres retrospective at the Paris Salon d'Automne
  • April 28 to July 21, 1997: At the Louvre in Paris
  • February 5 to May 31, 2009: Ingres et les Modernes at the Musée national des Beaux-arts in Québec
  • July 3 to October 4, 2009: Ingres et les Modernes at the Musée Ingres, Montauban

literature

  • Albert Dreyfus: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1780-1867 . In: Die Kunst: Monthly magazine for free and applied arts . tape 25 , issue 6 (November 23, 1911), volume 27. F. Bruckmann, Munich 1912, p. 125–148 , p. 130 The Turkish Bath ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • Hélène Toussaint, Suzy Delbourgo ;: Le bain turc d'Ingres: Musée du Louvre (=  Dossiers du Département des peintures . No. 1 ). Musées Nationaux, Paris 1971 (French).
  • Rose-Marie Hagen, Rainer Hagen: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: The Turkish bath . In: Image surveys . tape 1 : Old Masters - retold . Taschen, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-8228-9611-X .
  • Uwe Fleckner: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish bath: a classicist on the way to modernity . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-596-11345-8 .

Web links

Commons : Le Bain turc - Ingres (Louvre, RF 1934)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Official website of the Louvre with a detailed description (French)
  • Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres cartelfr.louvre.fr
  • Anita Brookner, Wibke von Bonin: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres “The Turkish Bath”, Paris, Musée National du Louvre. In: 1000 masterpieces. WDR, 1981, 10 min. (DVD, video)
  • Alain Jaubert: From Romanticism to Realism: Delacroix - Ingres - Courbet. Absolut Medien, Berlin 2012 (DVD, video)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Teodor de Wyzewa: L'oeuvre peint de Jean-Dominique Ingres. 42 photographies classées . Frédéric Gittler, Paris 1907, p. 6 , plate XLI, illustration (French, Textarchiv - Internet Archive , Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ a b Le Bain turc. louvre.fr (French, description of the Louvre).
  3. ↑ Le bain turc cineclubdecaen.com. (French, description).
  4. ↑ Sabine Poeschel: Strong men, beautiful women - The story of the act . Philipp von Zabern Verlag (WBG Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), Darmstadt 2014, ISBN 978-3-8053-4752-5 , p. 127 f .
  5. ↑ Charles Fegdal: Vallotton . VisiMuZ Editions, 2015 ( books.google.de ).
  6. ^ Karin H. Grimme: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Taschen, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-8228-5311-5 , pp. 85 f.
  7. ↑ La femme aux trois bras. Pop.culture.gouv.fr (French).
  8. ^ Page of the Fondation Napoléon with an image analysis by Karine Huguenaud
  9. ↑ Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen: Masterpieces in detail. Volume 2: From Rembrandt to Rivera. Taschen Köln 2011, ISBN 978-3-8365-1548-1 , p. 597.