After the Bath

Giovanni Boldini

National Gallery of Art

One person with brown skin lies on a patterned carpet and a nude woman, also with brown skin, stoops and holds a white cloth to her thighs in this loosely painted horizontal scene. A wall, painted with streaks and smudges of fog gray, white, and pale peach, spans the right two-thirds of the composition behind the people. In the leftmost third, a room bumps back in space, and an arched window there opens onto a view painted with strokes of shamrock green. We may be in a courtyard or another kind of brightly lit, enclosed space. The rug is loosely painted with visible dashes and dabs of raspberry pink, sapphire blue, mint green, pale yellow, white, and brown. The person lying on the rug is angled away from us, so the bare feet are closest, near the front left corner of the rug, and the head angles to our right, near the wall. That person is wrapped with white fabric over the head and chest, lemon-yellow fabric across the middle, and emerald green over the thighs. One ankle rests over the other, and the eye we see is closed. The nude woman stands just to our right, near the front right corner of the rug. Her black hair is short or pulled up. Dabs of gold around her neck suggest a coin-like necklace or large, round beads. Her full breasts hang as she holds the white cloth to her legs. The cloth is painted with short diagonal strokes, which cascade down her right leg, to our left, and pool on the floor. The toes of the foot we can see rest on the back of a pointed shoe painted with butter yellow and black. The other shoe sits just off the front edge of the rug, near the pooled white fabric. A side table with an octagonal top is at the back right corner of the rug, and is painted with crimson red, black, white, slate blue, and harvest gold. One orange is on the floor near the white fabric, and three more are near the back left corner of the carpet. A parrot, painted with an azure-blue body, white around the eye, a marigold-orange neck, and a pointed black beak, nibbles at an open orange on the floor nearby. A narrow white column rises from near the back left corner of the rug off the top edge of the painting. The wall behind the two people and the spaces in the room beyond, to our left, are loosely painted but with strokes that suggest geometric or lattice-like patterns. The artist signed the painting near the lower left: “Boldini.”