Walk through the galleries of any great art museum and you’ll likely happen upon paintings of people (usually women) bathing. This trope has been ingrained in our visual vocabulary that it hardly merits a second glance. But why have artists been drawn to this subject, and what do these images tell us about the history of bathing?

This episode, we reflect on how and why Western artists have depicted the bathing rituals of women throughout the centuries. We also chat with the artist Koak about her contemporary take on this storied genre. Plus, where’s the beef in all these paintings? We ponder the relative lack of dudes in bathing genre art.