Moorish Bath

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Moorish Bath: Jean-Leon Gerome

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Jean-Leon Gerome Oil Painting - Moorish Bath

Keywords: Moorish, Bath

Work Overview: Moorish Bath
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Date: 1870
Style: Orientalism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
Overall: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
Location: Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA, US

Among the most commercially successful artists of the nineteenth century, Gérôme built his reputation as an Orientalist, painting scenes of an imaginary place that combined characteristics of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean with his own fantasies and inventions. Here Gérôme afforded his viewer a glimpse into the private world of a woman’s bath, a scene he surely never witnessed. The pale, red-headed nude—perhaps meant to suggest a Circassian slave from the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire—forms a striking contrast to her African attendant in the sun-dappled interior of an Islamic bathhouse.

Griselda Pollock comments on the proliferation of harem imagery in the late nineteenth century:
“In European painting the combination of an African woman as slave or servant and an Oriental harem or domestic interior with reclining women, clothed or nude, represents a historical conjunction of two, distinct aspects of Europe’s relations with the world it dominated through colonization and exploited through slavery. The relations with Islamic culture – colonization – and with African peoples – trade in slaves and goods – collapse in Orientalist paintings into a trope for a masculine heterosexuality that is held in place by the displayed sexual body of a European or pale-skinned Arab woman. That there were Africans in Islamic North Africa there can be no doubt, but this rhetorical combination of sex and servitude is ‘logical’ only in an economy that has slavery as its political unconscious, and sedimented in its social rituals and erotic fantasies. This legacy – materially and ideologically – is, was part of Western modernity.”

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Jean-Leon Gerome

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