The Bath: Painting Analysis

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The Bath is an oil painting on canvas by French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme painted around the years of 1880 to 1885, featured in the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, California. Gérôme was born in 1824 and died in 1904, and studied at the French Academy of Fine Arts, so that much of his work falls within the style now known as academicism. The Bath is a painting featuring Orientalism, a trend that rose in the 19th century from Western artists that traveled to Western Asia. Orientalism became such a prevalent subject that the French Society of Orientalist Painters was founded in 1893, of which Jean-Léon Gérôme was the honorary president. One specific subtopic found within Orientalism was the exotic and romanticized portrayal …show more content…
Adhering to Neoclassicism, brushstrokes are not apparent in the painting, due to the fact that oil paints have a very long drying time, allowing for the color transitions and shading to be smooth and natural. Gérôme's palette is not wildly bright, but the colors he has chosen portray the scene as colorful, typical to Orientalism paintings of the time. Other Neoclassical elements of the painting include its shallow occupancy of space and its strong horizontals and verticals. The patterns and coloring Gérôme has given the walls draw clear horizontals, and the towel and the boxes on the ground offer verticals. There are also subtle lines to be found in the gridded tiling of the walls and the floor. The strength of these lines lend themselves to a feeling of timelessness: geometry doesn't change no matter how much time has passed, and in this case it gives the painting a sense of a moment forever paused. As for the women in the painting, they represent an idealized form of body, particularly so the fair one. Her figure is curvaceous and elegant. She is the brightest object in the painting, which likely also speaks to how attractive the viewer is meant to find her, and light falls tastefully on her shoulders and the back of her neck. Overall, it is satisfying to see the serenity with which she is bathed by the