Pool in a Harem

Pool in a Harem (Piscine dans un harem) is an oil painting on canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted in 1875–1876 for the Russian Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich, the future Emperor Alexander III, and now in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (GE-6221).

Gérôme, a leading academic painter and Orientalist, travelled repeatedly in the Middle East, and bath scenes became one of his recurring subjects. The picture was shown at the Paris Salon of 1876 under the title Turkish Women Bathing (Femmes turques au bain). In the dim interior of a bathhouse lit by openings in the dome, a dark-skinned attendant offers hookahs to two pale-skinned women: one with black hair sits on a carpet beside a small inlaid table, the other, red-haired, lies on a polished marble step. Further bathers stand and sit by the pool in the background, and a pavilion faced with floral tiles and Arabic inscriptions rises at the right. The red-haired figure was posed by Emma Dupont, one of Gérôme's regular models, and a separate nude study of her for this figure survives.

The canvas, 73.5 × 62 cm, hung in the Anichkov Palace and passed to the Hermitage in 1918. It was reproduced in 1878 on a whisky advertisement that drew protests from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

On 22 March 2001 the painting was cut from its stretcher and stolen from the Hermitage in broad daylight. It was considered lost until December 2006, when an anonymous man handed it, folded in four, to a Communist Party official at the State Duma in Moscow. The badly damaged canvas was restored at the Hermitage between February 2007 and November 2009 by the team that had earlier restored Rembrandt's Danaë, and a cross-shaped trace of the folds remains. The theft was never solved.