A Lady in Her Bath

A nude woman sits upright in a narrow tub draped with white cloth, her jeweled cap and pearls catching the light as she holds a carnation, while behind her a smiling wet nurse suckles a baby, a child reaches for the fruit spread on the tub-board, and a maid lifts a pitcher of bath water before the fireplace. Painted about 1571, this is the most celebrated of the French courtly bath scenes, long called a portrait of Diane de Poitiers but now read as an idealized Venus whose masklike features stand for courtly beauty rather than a named sitter; the union of Flemish precision — the still life of fruit, the crimped draperies — with Italianate grace made it a model of sixteenth-century French painting at the court of Charles IX. The panel descended through the Cook collection at Doughty House before entering the National Gallery of Art with the Samuel H. Kress Collection in 1961. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.