Bathsheba* by Jean-Léon Gérôme

This painting of an intimate atmosphere is fully part of the Orientalism movement, a highly prized French academic trend of the nineteenth century. The famous artist Gérôme Jean-Léon here combines with refinement the academic study of the female body with the poetry of a distant and misty urban landscape. The composition entitled “Bathsheba” stages a bather on a private terrace overlooking the sleeping city. This work expresses the artist’s marked taste for oriental genre scenes blending grace and mystery.

On a terrace paved with dark stone slabs, a young, completely naked woman, seen from behind, stands in the foreground, delicately stretching her arms. Near her, a servant dressed in a dark blue drapery and wearing a veil of the same color is crouched, preparing to wash her feet near a copper basin. A large white sheet is carelessly placed on a wooden stool to the right of the red oriental carpet on which they are settled. In the background, a tall stone fortified tower rises on the left of the composition. The rest of the landscape reveals the vaporous silhouette of an oriental city stretching under a pale blue sky veiled by a soft morning mist.

The exceptional virtuosity of the painter is revealed in the delicacy with which he models the female silhouette and captures the diffused light of dawn. His impeccable oil technique realistically restores the different textures, from the metal of the basin to the satin skin. This is a creation of remarkable classical beauty.