Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
the Turkish bath
1862

To recycle our own ideas
naked and those generous hips , it's not the first
time that Ingres painted them. More than 50 years ago,
so that he was a young boarder at the Academy
mie from France to Rome, he already staged
this woman, alone, in a pose almost
identical, in a work titled
Bather Valpinçon . And 20 years later,
freshly decorated with the Legion of Honor and
elected to the Academy of Fine Arts , he represented it
felt again on a cloth smaller
format, called the Little Bather - Interior
of harem , where she appeared in company
other women in the vapors of ham-mam. From the chaste solitary bather of her debut to the lute player surrounded by languorous slaves of her old age, Ingres summoned this woman several times without ever repeating herself.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was already 82 years old when he finished this work depicting the interior of an oriental harem. No less than twenty women
naked, languid in lascivious poses
provocative, expose themselves shamelessly
in the eyes of the viewer. The table, whose
sensuality will fascinate as much as it will shock
the contemporaries of the painter, will finally be
acquired by former Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey,
great collector of erotic paintings.
​
Among all these women, a carnivorous body
slightly more matte than the others,
stand out in the foreground. Wearing a turban, the oda-
lisque plays the lute with his back to us. She is the only one whose face is concealed from us, and yet it is towards her that our gaze is directed. But this back

The Valpinçon Bather , 1808

What we can take away:
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When an idea is good, it deserves to have several lives. Even when we seek to renew ourselves or innovate, it is sometimes useful to remember our past projects. Because once materialized, these ideas remain available to be taken up, diverted, transformed, transposed, deepened or extended... even years later.