Banho Turco Feminino (A Female Turkish Bath or Hammam) - Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier

Banho Turco Feminino (A Female Turkish Bath or Hammam) - Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier
Coleção privada
OST - 84x130 - 1785

This remarkable and perfectly-preserved picture, which anticipates by several decades the taste for Orientalist paintings in Western Europe, was painted to provide the design for an engraved plate to Ignatius Mouradgea d'Ohsson's Tableau Général de l'Empire Othoman. Through this work, published over many years in both folio and octavo editions, the enigmatic Baron D'Ohsson became a hugely influential figure in our understanding and appreciation of the culture of the Ottoman Empire, and a driving force in the upsurge of European interest in all things Turkish, which peaked well into the following century.  In the insatiable curiosity and the passion for encyclopaedic detail that permeates his published works he epitomised the spirit of enquiry of the Enlightenment. The present painting descended in his family until 2007.

Baron d'Ohsson was born into a French-Armenian family in Constantinople in 1740. From around 1760 he was employed as a Dragoman (a traditional post of interpreter and intermediary) at the Swedish Legation in Constantinople, and in 1775 he became personal and confidential secretary there to the Swedish King Gustav III. Gustav employed him to spy on his minister, Ulric von Celsing, and in 1780 ennobled him as Baron d'Ohsson. D'Ohsson was an influential figure in Ottoman public life and at the Sultan's court. He was a reformer by instinct, and invited by the Sultan Selim III to propose reforms of the Ottoman administration. He was also a successful entrepreneur, importing weaponry and ironmongery from Swedish foundries, gunpowder from Holland and grain from Salonika. Following his widowhood in 1782, but more likely because of the wealth of material that he had gathered for publication, d'Ohsson took leave in 1784 and went to Paris, where he published the first two volumes of his Tableau Général de l'Empire Othoman, in 1787 and 1789. After four years, however, after witnessing the storming of the Bastille, and following disagreements with his publishers, he went to Vienna. In 1792 he returned to Constantinople, where he resumed his diplomatic career, becoming Counsellor under the Swedish minister Pehr Olof von Asp. From 1795 to 1799 he held the office of Minister Plenipotentiary and was Head of the Swedish Legation in Constantinople, where he also represented the interests of the United States of America and Portugal.

The monumental folio volumes of his Tableau Général de l'Empire Othoman describe the daily life, mores and legal system of the Ottoman Empire, lavishly illustrated with engravings after designs by the leading artists of the day in France. They were not only hugely popular in Europe, but were greeted with rapture by Selim III, and because of their taxonomic cataloguing of Ottoman life, gave credence to their author's subsequent prescriptions for improvements, for example the establishment of the Military Officer's Technical School. Despite this, he fell out of favor with the Sublime Porte, and following the decline in Swedish influence after the murder of Gustav III, in 1799 he was expelled from Constantinople.

The plates illustrating the text of the Tableau Général were done under the supervision of Charles-Nicolas Cochin, (some plates are inscribed Cochin direxit) until 1787, when he and the author had a major falling-out, by which time the first two volumes were largely complete. D'Ohsson claimed to have assembled original illustrations by European and Greek painters (and a few Muslim artists) for his plates, writing in 1784 that he was awaiting 42 more paintings to be shipped from Constantinople. By paintings he may well have meant illustrations in watercolor or bodycolor on paper. Some at least are based on designs by Jean-Baptiste Hilaire, who spent some time in Turkey in 1776-7 working for the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, and who thus had direct experience of Turkish life. Some of the plates in the Tableau Général that are credited to Hilaire, had however to be re-drawn by Le Barbier to make them easier to engrave. Plate 167 in the Tableau Général, depicting the Sultan's Bath, is based directly on a detailed preparatory watercolor drawing by Le Barbier, in which the figures are stiff and elongated, suggesting that it was in turn closely based on one of the drawings done by a local artist and shipped to Paris.

The present painting served as the basis for Plate 13 in the first volume, and was engraved in the same sense by Robert DeLaunay le Jeune, and inscribed Le Barbier pinx.  The painting predates the publication of the first volume of the Tableau Général by two years, but the numbering along the bottom and right edges clearly shows that its design was intended to be transferred to an engraving. The architectural details are, given the exigencies of perspective, entirely accurate, but in contrast to Le Barbier's drawing for the comparable subject of plate 167, the composition is far more naturalistic and the figures appear more European, which suggests that the design was not based on a locally made drawing. The woman on the left holding the small tray with henna in her hands, and the child next to her, are very similar to a pastel by Jean-Etienne Liotard, which Le Barbier may well have known.

The plate is entitled: BAIN PUBLIC des femmes Mahomédanées (The Public Bath of Muslim Women) and illustrates a point made in d'Ohsson's text about ritual public cleanliness, and specifically the occasions that demand a complete washing of the body. Based on direct personal experience, he emphasized the decorum that prevailed in hammams as well as the pleasures of bathing and relaxing in the company of fellow women. The plate directly illustrates d'Ohsson's lengthy but informative account of the public hammam:

"Every city, town, village, however insignificant, has its public baths, Hammam... they are constantly heated: each sex has its own; there are also ones in common..., the day for women, the night for men... One never enters except naked, the body simply covered by a towel, Peschtumal, from breast to feet; it is of silk, linen, or cotton, always red or blue; on the feet one wears high clogs, Nalinn, because the heat of the pavement does not permit walking on it barefooted..."

"Women avail themselves of the services of the bath attendants..., These Telaks, as they are called, are singularly skilled at dressing the hair, washing the body, and rubbing the skin, from shoulders to feet; they use a bath mitt of serge, along with the lather of perfumed soap; they also use [Fuller's Earth], Kil, mixed with rose petals, to remove the oil from the hair. Since all Muslim women...depilate themselves, this too being a matter of religious principle, they also use a very fine caustic clay".

"Many women who have pains have themselves massaged by a matron..., especially those who have recently given birth. This procedure, often quite painful, usually occurs on a raised platform in the middle of the bath. Moreover, everything occurs in the greatest decency; every woman keeps on the towel in which she is wrapped; the bath attendants pass the hands under the towel to rub the stomach, the thighs and the legs. When one has finished bathing, one changes into a fine, clean chemise; the attendants also cover the shoulders with a cloth and the head with a white kerchief; one then passes into the antichamber of the bath, Djeamékeann..."

"There one experiences a calm and a well being difficult to describe; it is a sort of regeneration, its calm heightened by refreshing beverages, especially an exquisite coffee".

A modern account of a Turkish hammam would hardly differ.