In this painting, Hartigan reimagines Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Turkish Bath, a fantasy of female beauty and sexuality, imagined for male enjoyment. The unusual style of drawing references art school exercises, demonstrating that Ingres’ view of the female body is posed, not real. But by putting the bodies in motion, using transparent paint, and emphasizing facial expressions, Hartigan shifts the perception of woman as a sex object to considering her multifaceted, inner life. She poses the question: “I ask of the painting, ‘Are you going to be a paper doll, or a real woman?’”