La Toilette

The most active figure in Frédéric Bazille’s La Toilette is the woman bending towards a green slipper. Her extended arm crosses the foreground, connecting the seated nude to the things being prepared around her. At the other side, a woman in a striped dress waits with a flowered shawl. Between their movements, the central figure remains almost suspended: one hand rests on a shoulder, the other lies open against pale fur. This is a painting of a body, but also of the work and material surroundings that make its presentation possible.

Painted in 1870, the oil on canvas measures 130 × 128 cm and belongs to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, inventory 18.1.2. ^[1] Its nearly square field holds together an ambitious combination of life-model painting, elaborate textiles and an imagined dressing scene. The Fabre’s retrospective interpretation places it beside Bazille’s outdoor male nudes while connecting its interior subject to Delacroix and Manet. ^[2] Those relationships help explain a picture whose appearance of luxurious ease depends on a visibly demanding arrangement of three people.

A winter’s work for the Salon

In a letter to his father assigned to the end of 1869, Bazille listed three projects: the interior of his studio, a portrait of Édouard Blau and a female nude intended for the Salon. He expected them to occupy the winter. The letter places the nude within an active working programme that also embraced friendship and the artist’s own surroundings. Its brief description does not, by itself, establish that the composition was already fixed in the form of La Toilette. ^[3]

The more specific connection emerges from the correspondence discussed by Michel Schulman in his catalogue raisonné. In a letter dated to mid-February 1870, Bazille reported that his painting contained three women and that he had found three models, including a Black woman. Later, as the submission approached, he expressed satisfaction with the work and mentioned encouraging responses from his friends. These were reports from the studio, before the public verdict, and they reveal investment in the painting rather than certainty of success. The finished canvas bears his signature and the date 1870 at lower left. ^[4]

The intended companion was Summer Scene, with its male bathers beside the water. The Fabre’s 2016 exhibition described La Toilette as an indoor counterpart to that outdoor composition. ^[2] Together, the works offered different answers to the problem of painting the modern nude. One distributes bodies across a landscape; the other concentrates them within a room. In La Toilette, proximity, dress and the giving or withholding of attention matter as much as anatomical form.

The scale makes the encounter substantial without turning it into an expansive panorama. There is little unoccupied ground around the women. The standing figure approaches the right edge, while the crouching figure spreads across the lower left. The central woman is held between them, yet the two flanking bodies prevent her pale skin from becoming the sole organising fact. The arrangement gives the attendants weight and presence, even as the scene assigns them the practical work of dressing someone else.

The body and the people around it

The nude sits at an angle rather than stretching horizontally across the whole canvas. Her torso rises towards the upper centre, and her legs lead down into the foreground. Loose hair falls over one shoulder, changing from a dark mass near her head into softer strands against skin and fur. Her face turns towards the standing woman, but the painting offers no clear exchange of speech or expression that would settle what passes between them.

Her two arms establish different kinds of contact. On the left of the image, her hand rests on the crouching woman’s shoulder. To the right, the other arm extends across the fur, its relaxed wrist and fingers contributing to the pose’s languor. One gesture depends upon another person; the other meets a cushioned surface. Together, they make repose appear supported, physically and socially.

The woman below bends with her back towards us. Her face is seen only in partial profile, while the broad curve of her shoulder and the reach of her arm give her action a strong directional force. The slipper is a small object, but it supplies the scene with an immediate task. Another green slipper lies near the bottom edge. That separation lets the viewer imagine a moment within a sequence of dressing, although the painting remains remarkably still.

The standing figure offers a different rhythm. Her head and upper body incline towards the central woman, while the dark cloth held in her hands falls towards the floor. The close vertical stripes of her dress make her presence unusually insistent. Her clothing articulates the body beneath it, and the shawl creates another broad area of colour and pattern below. Looking from one woman to the next, the eye moves between bent, seated and standing poses rather than following a single dramatic event.

This distribution of activity complicates the usual description of a nude with attendants. The central figure occupies the brightest, least patterned area, but the people around her control the visible actions. Her repose and their work coexist within the same tightly constructed space. The image makes that imbalance available to scrutiny without providing a complete story about the women’s relationships.

How textiles build the room

There is almost no architecture to locate the scene. Instead, fabric supplies the enclosure. A warm, densely patterned hanging covers the background, and pale fur spreads across the seat and down towards the foreground. The backdrop’s large central motif rises behind the nude’s head. It gives her an emphatic setting while remaining part of a repeated ornamental field.

The women are distinguished through materials as well as poses. The crouching figure wears a bright headwrap and a cloth striped in red, cream and other colours around her lower body. At right, narrow dark stripes run through the standing woman’s pale dress. The shawl she holds carries much larger floral shapes against a dark ground. Between these patterns, the nude’s skin becomes a relatively quiet surface. Her body is therefore central through difference, rather than through size alone.

The pale textiles are varied too. Fur is suggested through irregular touches and shifts between light and darker passages; the sheet over the nude’s legs makes broader, smoother folds. It partly covers the body while allowing its position to remain legible. Near the bottom, fabric gathers and spreads into the space occupied by the slippers and the attendants. These edges draw the spectator towards the practical objects that a first glance at the nude might overlook.

The Fabre’s 2016 interpretation emphasises Bazille’s ability to differentiate materials and organise an adventurous range of colour in this work. ^[2] The textiles do more than advertise luxury. They give the painting its intervals, directions and contrasts. Small stripes, large floral forms, soft fur and bare skin ask for different kinds of attention within a single scene.

Colour consequently circulates beyond the central figure. The green slippers hold the lower part of the composition; the headwrap supplies a concentrated warm accent; the flowered shawl opens a larger field of dark and bright marks on the right. The surrounding objects compete with the nude, but they also make her particular painted appearance possible. Remove their density and her smooth, pale form would have a different force.

A drawing before the decorated interior

A preparatory pencil drawing, catalogued as MSb-206, preserves an earlier arrangement of the subject. The sheet belongs to the Musée d’Orsay’s collection and is kept in the Louvre’s Department of Graphic Arts. Schulman describes its numbered grid and the changes between its figure grouping and the finished canvas. The drawing provides evidence of deliberate compositional planning; it does not establish that a corresponding grid was transferred onto the painting. ^[5]

The decorative setting became much more elaborate in paint. In Schulman’s account, the study lacks the final wall hanging and the developed fur and textile ensemble. The standing figure at right is explored in small sketches beside the principal arrangement rather than fully incorporated there. These differences show that the balance between the women and the setting remained open during preparation. ^[5]

Schulman considers whether the background suggested in the drawing might imply an initial outdoor conception. That remains a proposal rather than an established location for an earlier version. ^[5] The drawing shows more securely that the finished room, with its enveloping fabric and tightly joined figures, developed through successive choices. Its ornamental richness was not an inevitable consequence of the initial idea.

The study also changes how one sees the apparent ease of the final pose. Drapery can conceal transitions and cushion awkward junctions between bodies and furniture. Here, those materials participate in a composition that had to be worked out. The evidence lies in the relation between drawing and painting, rather than in an imagined account of spontaneous execution.

Models, names and staged roles

The three women were models taking part in the making of a painting. The roles assigned to them within the picture are a separate matter. A woman depicted assisting with a slipper is not thereby documented as a servant in her everyday life, and a scene drawing on Orientalist conventions does not prove that its model was enslaved. Bazille’s correspondence, as presented by Schulman, identifies the practical need to find three models but does not supply a secure personal name for the Black woman. ^[4]

There is a proposed identification for the woman in the striped dress. Schulman recounts earlier arguments by Sarraute and Douglas Cooper connecting her with Renoir’s model Lise. That is a scholarly identification based on comparison, rather than a name inscribed on the canvas or established by Bazille’s surviving description of the session. It is best retained as a possibility. ^[4]

The unnamed Black model has also been associated with Bazille’s two Young Woman with Peonies paintings. Schulman proposes the connection, but it should not be turned into a complete biography or confused with Laure, the model associated with Manet’s Olympia. ^{[6] [7]} The visual comparison is nevertheless revealing. In the Montpellier version, the woman’s attention centres on placing a flower in an arrangement. In the Washington version, she faces the spectator with flowers held forward. The Fabre’s retrospective interpretation connects both flower paintings and La Toilette with Manet’s example. ^[2]

These changes of action alter the person’s place within each image. The peony paintings give a Black woman the principal figure role; La Toilette makes her part of a group whose hierarchy depends on contrasting bodies and kinds of work. That difference deserves attention even if the sitter’s personal identity remains unresolved.

The Musée d’Orsay’s 2019 exhibition Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse placed particular emphasis on the relationship between artists and models, including the contribution of Black people working in the Parisian art world. Its framing encourages a view of such sitters as participants in artistic production, alongside an examination of the conventions imposed on their painted appearances. ^[7] In La Toilette, both questions remain present: what this woman does within the scene, and how her work as a model helped bring the scene into existence.

Old masters, Delacroix and Renoir

Schulman places the painting within a broad tradition of women bathing, dressing or receiving assistance. His comparisons include Veronese’s Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, particularly its crouching attendant, and Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. ^[4] These are comparisons proposed by the catalogue, rather than documentary proof that Bazille copied a particular figure while working on this canvas.

The distinction matters. A bending attendant can carry a compositional function across very different subjects: a low figure anchors a group, directs the eye upwards and gives another person a reason to remain still. The pose does not bring the original picture’s religious narrative with it. La Toilette supplies no attributes that require us to identify the seated woman as a saint, biblical heroine or named literary character.

The Delacroix comparison concerns an imagined interior and a concentration of colour, fabric and bodies. The Fabre’s 2016 exhibition explicitly presented La Toilette as an homage to Delacroix’s Orientalism as well as to Manet. ^[2] Here, Orientalism describes a European pictorial construction of an alluring elsewhere. The hanging, shawl and headwrap help produce that atmosphere; they cannot locate the scene in a particular country or establish the origins of the women who posed.

Renoir offers a closer comparison within Bazille’s own circle. Schulman discusses his Odalisque and related images of women in Algerian dress, including works later than La Toilette. ^[4] The later examples clarify a shared repertory of costumes and poses; they cannot have served as sources for an earlier painting. Such comparisons reveal how the same circle could use contemporary models to explore an inherited exoticising language.

The Orsay exhibition described Bazille’s result as a mixture of modern Paris and a distant, imagined Orient. ^[7] The painting’s uncertainty of place is part of that mixture. Its women are presented with the bodily specificity of models in a studio, while the decorative setting invites the spectator to imagine another world around them.

The encounter with Olympia

Manet’s Olympia, painted in 1863 and shown at the Salon of 1865, is the central modern comparison. The Orsay exhibition examined both its transformation of inherited conventions and the different critical attention given to its white nude and Black attendant. Its interpretation places Manet’s scene in contemporary Paris, with a social specificity that changes the meaning of the luxurious surroundings and bouquet. ^[7]

Bazille adopts a related conjunction of a pale nude, a Black woman and conspicuous textiles, but distributes their attention differently. His central figure does not confront the spectator with Olympia’s direct gaze. Her head turns within the group, and the actions of the two clothed women make dressing the immediate subject. This difference does not require a psychological explanation about Bazille’s upbringing. It is visible in the way the composition arranges eyes, hands and objects.

The additional woman at right is especially consequential. She gives the nude someone within the picture towards whom to turn. The shawl in her hands offers a possible continuation of the action: the body now exposed may shortly be covered. The crouching woman’s slipper supplies another practical stage. These gestures create a small internal world in which the spectator watches people preparing and waiting.

The Fabre’s retrospective account treats La Toilette as evidence of Bazille’s growing engagement with Manet and of his development since his early female nude. ^[2] Yet the comparison becomes most useful when it preserves the differences. Bazille’s picture organises a triangular group within a nearly square enclosure; its decorative activity repeatedly pulls attention away from the nude and back again. Its effect rests on that movement, rather than on reproducing Olympia’s encounter with the viewer.

Admiration and disagreement

The same competition between body and setting has divided the painting’s interpreters. Schulman recounts criticism by François Daulte of the central figure’s bodily firmness, and earlier objections that the elaborate costumes and furnishings distract from her. He also records assessments that find La Toilette less compelling than Bazille’s strongest outdoor figure compositions. These are later judgements, not evidence of what the Salon jury said when it rejected the picture. ^[4]

There is another way to assess the very qualities that troubled those critics. In his 2016 account, Michel Hilaire stresses the painting’s decorative power and rich colour, placing it close to Manet and suggesting an affinity with Matisse’s later achievement. That forward comparison is Hilaire’s interpretation, rather than evidence that Bazille anticipated a particular later work. ^[8]

The disagreement turns on what one expects the painting to accomplish. If everything should reinforce the nude’s bodily authority, the restless surroundings may appear to weaken her. If the subject includes the relation between a body, other people and things, that distributed attention becomes essential. The stripes and floral shapes have their own force, and the bent woman’s movement is more decisive than the nude’s repose. The painting allows the spectator to experience those competing claims without resolving them into a single hierarchy.

Rejection, then a different public life

Bazille submitted La Toilette and Summer Scene to the Salon of 1870. According to the correspondence assembled by Schulman, he initially told his parents, around 7 or 8 April, that both had been accepted. By early May he was trying to understand the exclusion of the second painting and entertained the possibility that a mistake or omission had occurred. The eventual result was that Summer Scene was exhibited and La Toilette was rejected. Hilaire’s account and the Orsay’s 2019 interpretation confirm that distinction. ^{[4] [8] [7]}

His early announcement therefore cannot be treated as the final exhibition record. Nor does his suspicion of an administrative error establish why the jury refused the picture. The surviving account leaves a gap between the artist’s hopes and the decision. It does not provide a secure jury explanation based on subject, colour or anatomy.

The painting eventually reached a substantial public audience. It appeared in the Paris centennial exhibition of 1900 under the title Sortie de bain, or After the Bath. The Orsay’s 2019 documentation identifies that title with this large canvas. ^[7] It should be distinguished from the smaller After the Bath historically attributed to Bazille, whose authorship Schulman now questions. A shared title does not make them the same object. ^[9]

The canvas was included in the Bazille retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1910, another stage in its public emergence. ^[4] It remained with the artist’s family before Marc Bazille gave it to the Musée Fabre in 1918. ^[1] Later exhibition contexts have encouraged different kinds of attention: the Washington retrospective of 2017 included it in the development of Bazille’s painting, while Black Models in 2019 brought the model and the conventions of representation into sharper focus. ^{[10] [7]} The canvas sustains both approaches. Its ambitious surface depends on a close arrangement of people, gestures and materials; looking carefully at one inevitably brings the others into view.