Greek Lady at the Bath

This painting, a fine example of eighteenth-century French genre painting "á la Greque", is a second version of Vien’s success at the Salon exhibition of 1763, where his painting was praised as “exquisite” by Diderot and purchased by the duc d’Orléans. In 1767, the duc de Choiseul, a leading collector in France, commissioned a copy for the bedroom of his Paris hôtel. Transporting the viewer into the world of antiquity, Vien depicts a young maiden leaning against a marble balustrade while her semi-clad attendant dries her enamel-like skin.