"The turkish bath, a dry and wet at the same time"
(Montauban, 1780 - Paris, 1867)Le Bain turc 1862
Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier - M. Bard
At the end of his life, Ingres created the most erotic of all his works with this harem scene. In it he combines the figure of the nude with an oriental theme, taking as his inspiration the letters of Lady Montague (1690-1760), who recounts a visit to a women's baths in Instanbul in the early eighteenth century. Ingres has borrowed figures from some of his previous paintings for this composition full of arabesques. This late masterpiece was only revealed to the public many years after his death.
38.58 × 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a German romantic artist, is one of the central figures in the painting of symbolic landscapes. This piece illustrates the sublime, associated with dimensions of greatness and founded on awe and terror. These, too, are central to English romanticism. Consider, for example, Wordsworth's comment about how he "grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear" (The Prelude, 1:301-02).
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