Bizarre though it may seem, A Lover’s Pinch is a site dedicated entirely to two ladies who met briefly in France some 400 years ago.
For reasons now lost to us, someone commissioned a painting of them sitting together in a sumptuous bath. There is something really quite unusual about that painting, but you probably noticed that already…
When I first came across it in the Louvre in 2005, I did what most people who see it have done. I thought “That’s weird?” and I searched the internet to discover more. Most people stop at that point, once they discover how frustratingly little is known about this painting, but I just kept on searching.
My name is Jean Ravencourt (see about me) and I must confess, that this painting became a bit of an obsession of mine. I wrote a novel to fill the gaps in our knowledge with some creative ideas about why it was painted.
Basically what we know about the painting is:
- It is painted in the style of the 2nd School of Fontainebleau,
- The lady on the right is probably Gabrielle d’Estrées, a mistress of Henri IV,
- The nipple-pinch is to indicate that she is pregnant,
- It was probably painted between 1594 and 1599.
For the longer list of what we don’t know about this picture, go to the paintings page.
On the pages of this site, you can find out about the history of this painting and a mysterious set of similar scenes involving these two ladies. You can buy the novel that I wrote depicting the lives and loves of our two bathers, learn a bit about the history of those times and peruse some posts about historical mysteries in general.
Did I mention you could buy the novel?
A Lover's Pinch 