EUROPE, 1500
“Ah, gentleman. I’m glad to see you’ve all managed to arrive safely. I trust you had pleasant journeys.”
Murmurs of assent.
“Let us begin. Europe is at the height of her cultural and political influence; we have the riches of the classical world as well as the novelties of the Age of Discovery to draw upon as we enter a new era of artistic expression. What, then, shall we paint?”
Abashed silence.
“Nothing? Gentlemen, I’m surprised at you. Speak up.”
A small voice from the back of the room.
“What if…what if we draw a lot of pictures of women getting out of the bathtub? From behind?”
Astonished whispers. Bathtubs, women, balderdash, nonsense, never heard of such a thing, backsides.
“Let him speak, gentleman.”
“I think…I think it would be interesting. To just paint a lot of women, stepping out of bathtubs, from the back, for the foreseeable future.”
“Could we also draw these women stepping into the bathtub? Or in the act of bathing itself?”
“No. Only immediately after.”
Another voice interjects.
“Could the ladies be painted from another angle? Facing the painter, for example, or three-quarte–”
“Ladies, stepping out of tubs, from behind.”
“I see. And what kind of fully-bathed women shall we paint?”
“Just tall, Dutch-looking women with braided hair. That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, maybe a few French ladies. But nobody else.”
“Gentlemen? Shall we put it to a vote?”
The motion carries, unanimously.
Edgar Degas, Woman At Her Bath
Albrecht Dürer, Woman’s Bath
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Large Bathers
François Boucher, Diana After the Bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath
Edward Degas, Breakfast After A Bath
John Reinhard Weguelin, The Bath
Anders Zorn, Le Tub
Hermann Pleuer, The Bathing Girls
Vladimir Alexandrovich Plotnikov, In The Bath House
Tony Robert-Fleury, Le Bain
Anders Zorn, Girls from Dalarna in the sauna
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bather Sitting
Paul Peel, A Venetian Bather
Henri Gervex, The Tub
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Bathers
André Favory, Bathing Nude
Edward Degas, The Bath — Woman Supporting Her Back
Edward Degas, Candaules’s Wife
Alexandre Jacques Chantron, Pleasures of Summer
Tags: art history, artistic motifs, artwork, follow your bliss, i guess, ladies gettin’ outta tubs, nudity, patterns, that chick in the renoir looks like brigitte bardot
Perfect.
Wow. There’s a whole story in that Turkish Bath painting. Lady with the fancy gold hat is super-pleased with herself for getting a handful of boob, and the blond in the middle is clearly not happy about it. Or hates dulcimer playing.
I looked at that painting and thought, “That room is too crowded for anyone to enjoy a nice bath.” I dunno about you, but when I’m bathing, I do not want to be skin to skin with 80 other ladies. At least not if I’m bathing for hygiene purposes.
Well, the “Turkish bath” in question is a Turkish harem imagined by an 80-year-old Frenchman, so it’s
A. an Orientalist fantasy of the supposedly sybaritic pleasures of another culture;
B. not an imagination of female pleasures, but of the pleasure that a limitless bevy of women, not so much individuals as a cluster of bodies assembled for their fleshy delight, could offer to the men who might similarly imagine them.
That it, this painting isn’t an image of a pleasant bathhouse, but of everpresent female availability for men.
Sing it!
Ah, indeed. So, my reaction of “ugh, gross” stands, but for additional reasons.
Well, they had to get their semi-legal jollies somewhere….
Yet none of these capture the reality of stepping out of a bath, awkwardly and inelegantly in genuine fear of death by slipping.
lady supporting her back comes close. “careful, careful…”
Please tell me you’re quoting season 1 Liz Lemon. Because that’s the 30 Rock line I think of every morning when I exit the tub.
NOR fear of miscarriage by bar of soap placed by evil lady’s maid.
I am still so upset w that plot line! She was never found out! And it would have been great to have another baby in the house 🙁
Less successful bathroom painting tropes: women pooping, women clipping their toenails, women applying deodorant, and women cleaning hair out of the drain.
I’m now naming my first album “Girls from Dalarna in the Sauna.”
What I’m mainly getting from this is that, physical body-wise, I’m a little old-fashioned. I could be that venetian bather.
But why were guys so obsessed with how women washed themselves? Was it just the thought that they would be NAKED but because it was in a painting it was ART and therefore ok?
It’s interesting to compare paintings like these to some of George Quaintance’s work (which you should not Google at work — think Tom of Finland, but slightly less explicit). Some of his paintings are also “groups of people of the same gender bathing together,” but they definitely read as porn. Because that was his intent? Because unclothed men together seems more taboo? Smarter people than I will have to judge those questions.
bather sitting, even
But why were guys so obsessed with how women washed themselves?
I’m just spitballing here, but:
– because portraying someone just after the bath, and especially in these unguarded postures, often seen from behind, suggests a sense of vulnerability, a feeling intimacy conveyed to the viewer without the cost or vulnerability of being seen oneself.
– because it allows them to portray a passing moment of nudity as an eternity, thus implying that these women aren’t the kind of women to lounge around naked for prurient enjoyment or even for their own pleasure; these are women naked for a purpose, and therefore capturing the moment of nudity provides a frisson, a thrill of exposing the respectable unawares.
– because the bath – and especially the moments just after the bath – convey both a physical and a metaphorical sense of cleanness. These women are as clean, in body and in spirit, as they will ever be, and you the viewer are privy to that private sense of fresh purity.
– because the Venus surprised at her bath trope provides an unstated sense of power to the viewer: no woman, not even a goddess, is more powerful and knowing than he, and not even Venus can protect herself against his omnipresent eyes.
I study, and have even written about, naked ladies bathing in art history, and my professional art historical opinion is that the category of “the nude” was invented so you could look at pictures of nekkid people with your grandma and not feel weird about it.
I believe it’s all porny. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I mean, I think all the comments here are a propos and interesting, but re: the Degas at least, we were taught in high school/college art history that a lot of the paintings of women bathing in hip baths were actually images of prostitutes (like, sponge-bathing between clients?) and so meant to be very risqué/titillating. (That doesn’t really take away from the bizarreness of the cultural artifact of woman-in-bath, but it maybe gives a context for it as a deliberate content-marker?)
[I know this is pedantic, but I gotta say – I get the spirit that these “western art” posts are in, but some of them kind of rub me the wrong way in that they pick up on one common thing of a type of art (hell like a beehive, people out of scale, women bathing) and imagine this elaborate out-of-context narrative for it that disregards a perfectly reasonable historical explanation. I know – that’s EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE MEANT TO DO AND I’M A HUMORLESS BITCH and I should just not read them, but given how stringently and charmingly nerdy everything else on the toast is, it bugs me in a can’t-not-look way.]
I enjoy these posts largely because after the jokes I can go to the comments and someone will invariably provide an interesting historical explanation for why something was so common.
oh, that’s nice. i didn’t think of that. reading back i guess there’s no way my comment couldn’t look bitchy – i just had to let it out. (also gotta say high fives to your sn!)
That “Venetian Bather” is definitely of the prepubescent-boy-stepping-out-of-a-bath variety…
There are a couple of comments to that effect here, and I guess I’m not getting it? Other than having skinny arms, she has hips and a tush, and even has those above-the-butt dimples that some women have. We can’t tell if she has (or lacks, for that matter) breasts given the angle. I guess I just don’t see the pre-pubescent-ness of that nude? My view might be skewed given that I have a lot of very slim women in my family, and that bather could basically be my sister from behind.
It’s mainly proportions, as far as I see it. Look at the scale of the figure compared to the chair in the background – that would be a very short adult. Also, compare the proportion of the hips and waist to those in the other paintings (of similar time periods and aesthetic ideals). Women in those paintings usually had much wider hips. If you ask me, the figure looks an awful lot like a twelve year old boy.
It COULD be a lady, but I def see a boy. The waist seems kind of low… right? Compared to the other naked ladies. And he’s bending to make it look like he’s got a waist up there.
Yeah, that one definitely looks preadolescent to me as well. I think it could be a boy or a girl.
The Paul Peel one makes me uncomfortable as she’s clearly 9 years old. Ecch.
I think it might be that the artist used a male model in place of a female one, which I suspect is the case with a few of these. I mean…look at the quads on André Favory’s “Bathing Nude.”
Paul Peel pretty much painted lots of uncomfortably young women. Google “The Little Shepherdess”. Not for him these giant, mature women.
wowwww right there are several that I wouldn’t post in here.
Wait you’re supposed to get a maid with coffee after a bath? This has never happened to me. Fuck my life.
A trope subverted by Gustave Caillebotte (gay French painter whom I love to pieces) here
http://artdaily.com/news/50566/Museum-of-Fine-Art…
I feel like the Toast needs a “butts” tag.
That one lady in the Dürer definitely had butt implants.
Had any of these men seen breasts before? Like in the flesh, not from another painting.
That’s why so many of them are from the back. “What do breasts look like? Do you have any idea?” “No clue, but just draw her from the back.” “GENIUS!”
Aw come on, I was getting a little giddy because some of these ladeez have breasts that look like mine! Dang it, I was modelled after some weird art boobies that don’t even exist 🙁
I agree! These breasts seem like a pretty normal range of shapes and spreads…nothing Michelangelesque(?) here. Your breasts are super!
All of these paintings are helping combat the long-term trauma of stumbling across David’s The Death of Marat at a formative age. BATHS ARE SCARY AND FATAL AND IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL YOU’LL END UP IN A TUB OF BLOOD.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII… like Anders Zorn and I cannot lie [etc]
I wish I could explain how disappointed I am by the lack of a #butts tag here. Needs 100% more #butts tags.
Then there's the Diana After the Bath, where the woman on the left is leaning forward, apparently ogling what's between the other woman's legs.
I could swear that the women-in-the-bath scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller looks a lot like that Anders Zorn painting, right down to the lighting and composition. But I haven’t seen that movie in years, and I can’t find any stills or YouTube clips of that scene, so I could be completely misremembering it.
well this made me laugh right out loud
😀
I was doing okay until I hit "Le Tub." After that I just gave in to undignified laugh-snorts.
Am I the only one who finds it weird that NONE of these women seem to have pubic hair? Was there an epic plague of bush-lice going around or something?
I worried about the same thing. Is pubic hair a result of Darwinian evolutions so that women didn’t have it/need it until like 1898?
Yes! I lived in a Finnish commune with a coed sauna for two years and it did wonders for my body acceptance. Before living there I had never seen any adult female bodies (except super-airbrushed in the media or–rarely–in life-drawing classes), and I thought there were a bunch of things seriously and grotesquely wrong with mine. I think we would benefit from something like that in the US for sure.
A tumblr post of a painting of a woman coming out of her bathtub/well got some truly hilarious commentary http://jake-clark.tumblr.com/post/138511874552/au…
It’s also a truly hilarious painting, oh my gosh! Imagine Mallory captioning it…sweet dream.
Conclusions:
1. “The Large Bathers”? Well excuse ME, Mr. the most accomplished chubby chaser in history.
2. Anders Zorn gillade stora rumpar and he could not lie.
3. Harem fantasies and male gaze be damned. Oh, I’m supposed to follow that up with something, right? Anyway, there’s no reason communal bathing shouldn’t include music, dancing and cuddling for those so inclined. And coffee, ALL the coffee! I may have been going about the whole bathing thing wrong.
4. “The Tub” seems to be the go-to title for artists who at least want it to look like they’re not massive fetishists. “Oh, there’s a lady there too? Didn’t notice, I was just trying to capture the reflection of the light in this lovely copper vessel.”
Conclusions:
1. "The Large Bathers"? Well excuse ME, Mr. the most accomplished chubby chaser in history.
2. Anders Zorn gillade stora rumpar and he could not lie.
3. Harem fantasies and male gaze be damned. Oh, I'm supposed to follow that up with something, right? Anyway, there's no reason communal bathing shouldn't include music, dancing and cuddling for those so inclined. And coffee, ALL the coffee! I may have been going about the whole bathing thing wrong.
4. "The Tub" seems to be the go-to title for artists who at least want it to look like they're not massive fetishists. "Oh, there's a lady there too? Didn't notice, I was just trying to capture the reflection of the light in this lovely copper vessel."