#the bath

Le Bain (The Bath) (c. 1867) by Alfred Stevens (Belgian, 1823 – 1906), oil on canvas, 73.5 cm (28.9 in) x 92.8 cm (36.5 in), Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Bath (1973) by John Koch

London, the 1920s. A man who carved letters into stone for a living - headstones, war memorials, inscriptions for churches - picks up a pencil and draws a woman's body with the same devotion he brought to an alphabet. Eric Gill was a contradiction that no art movement could fully contain. Trained as an architect's apprentice, radicalized by the Arts and Crafts movement, obsessed with the idea that art and craft were the same sacred act. By the time he drew "The Bath," he'd become one of Britain's foremost sculptors and typographers - the man who designed Gill Sans, who carved "Prospero and Ariel" on the BBC's headquarters. But his private drawings reveal someone working through the body with an almost liturgical intensity. No academic finish. No idealized Venus reclining on silk for a Paris Salon jury. Just graphite on cream paper, a figure leaning or half-seated, her left side carrying soft shading while the right thins into contour and bare page. A few strokes of red chalk along the edge where her hand meets a surface - deliberate, startling against all that grey. The face is turned away, left undetailed. The legs dissolve below the thigh. Gill believed leaving a work visibly unfinished was more honest than polishing it into illusion. That red chalk line at the lower left sits unexplained - a compositional anchor, a color note for a future version? The kind of studio trace that makes drawings feel more alive than finished paintings. Gill remains a deeply controversial figure, and rightly so. But the drawing stands on its own terms: the hand, the craft, the process laid bare. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com

The Bath, 1930 Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950 oil on canvas 68 7/8 × 47 3/4 in. (174.9 × 121.3 cm) Saint Louis Art Museum

(In this work, Max Beckmann represented himself with his first wife, Minna)