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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.”

Giovanni Boldini

After the Bath, after 1889

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 81

Medium

oil on wood

Dimensions

overall: 25.4 × 34.29 cm (10 × 13 1/2 in.)

framed: 34.61 × 43.18 × 5.4 cm (13 5/8 × 17 × 2 1/8 in.)

Credit Line

Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)

Accession Number

2015.19.19

Artists / Makers

Giovanni Boldini (painter) Italian, 1842 - 1931

Image Use

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Inscription

lower left: Boldini

Provenance

Messrs. P. L. Everard & Co., London; (their sale, 28 April 1873, Hotel Drouot, Paris, no. 6 as Le Bain turc). M. Faure, Paris. George I. Seney; (his sale, American Art Association, New York, 11-13 February 1891, no. 158); American Art Association, New York; (sale, American Art Association, New York, 11 April 1892, no. 11); Stanford White [1853-1906], New York; (his estate sale, American Art Association, New York, 11-12 April 1907, no. 29); William A. Clark [1839-1925], New York; bequest April 1926 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2015 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

American Art Association
Clark, William Andrews
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Faure, M.
Seney, George I.
White, Stanford

Exhibition History

1972: Italian Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New York Cultural Center; Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, Florida; Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville; Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972-1973, no. 6, repro.

1978: The William A. Clark Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 26 April - 16 July 1978, unnumbered catalogue.

1983: Sargent's Contemporaries, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 4 June - 28 August 1983, unpublished checkllist, no. 4.

2001: Antiquities to Impressionism: The William A. Clark Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 3 November 2001 - 4 February 2002, unnumbered catalogue.

Bibliography

1925: Carroll, Dana H. Catalogue of Objects of Fine Art and Other Properties at the Home of William Andrews Clark, 962 Fifth Avenue. Part I. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. (1925): 165.

2002: Dini, Piero, and Francesca Dini. Giovanni Boldini, 1842-1931: catalogo ragionato. Turin, 2002: vol. 3, 92, no. 146, repro.

2002: Panconi, Tiziano. Giovanni Boldini : l’opera completa.. Florence, 2002: 145, repro., as Dopo il bagno.

2009: Lees, Sarah, Richard Kendall, and Barbara. Guidi. Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris.Exh. cat. Ferrara, 2009: 30, fig. 6, 32. NGA work not in exhibition.