In 1861, local historian Charles Bernard Gibson wrote that, ‘Viewed from the river, [the baths] remind the traveller of a Turkish temple on the Bosphorus.’ Hardly—though orientalism was still awaiting Edward Said for its modern interpretation.

And if the Irish painter John E Bosanquet was no Ingres, he too seems guilty of a certain romanticism in his painting of the hotel (Figs 20.5 and 20.6) if we compare it with a photograph of the baths taken around the same time. The baths are in the building with the four cupolas on the left.