This is the final scene in the series of paintings The Four Times of Day by Lancret. The painting was etched and engraved in reverse by Nicolas de Larmessin III as part of his series The Four Hours of Day, completed by February 1741.
By the silvery light of a spring or summer moon a group of women are bathing together in a woodland pond. The secluded bosky setting makes them look like the moon goddess Diana and her nymphs. Two of the women stand in the pond up to their calves. One is about to splash another lady who is lying on the ground with one foot in the pond, apparently testing the water. The other lady standing in the water covers her breast with her chemise and looks to her right as though she has heard a noise among the trees. One lady rubs her foot, apparently about to get out from the flat-bottomed boat, while another in the boat wrings out water from the hem of her shift.
Attached to the boat is a cane or metal framework, which could be draped with cloth to provide a degree of privacy for its occupants. Lancret would have known such boats called toues that were moored in the Seine. They were covered by a large awning and had a small ladder enabling occupants to climb down into the water to swim or simply to stand in the river, supported by underwater platforms. When the picture was painted, it was still believed that water penetrated the body and so affected its organs and functions, which may explain why the women are entering the pond so cautiously even though it is evidently very shallow.
Evening is in poor condition. Larmessin’s print suggests that it was once much more animated and finely detailed. The ladies are all bathing almost entirely covered up in a modest scene that avoids any public indecency. It is possible that Lancret himself covered the previously exposed breasts of the figure seated in the foreground, and of the one standing immediately behind her. However he left exposed the breast of the lady who is furthest away.
Lancret painted a number of scenes showing women bathing – the woman in the background here also appears in his L’Eté of about 1722–5 (Hermitage, St Petersburg), Women bathing of about 1718 (Wallace Collection, London) and Les Plaisirs du Bain (Louvre, Paris) probably of the 1730s. The modest gesture of this frequently repeated stooping figure may have had its origin in the Venus de’ Medici (Uffizi, Florence), an antique marble statue well known in France though prints and through copies made in marble and bronze for Louis XIV.
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