Narrator: Chief Curator Emily Beeny:

Emily Beeny: This picture is meant to evoke the private interior of a harem - a part of the household reserved for women in various corners of the Ottoman Empire.  But it is really the product of fantasy and stereotype.

Narrator: Jean-Léon Gérôme painted the picture around 1885. He traveled widely in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean – but would never have had access to this kind of space in reality.

Sebihi: Upon seeing this for the first time, I do think there's an intuitive sense of discomfort - the fact that these women are in a bathhouse; there's a dark-skinned woman who is washing a seated white woman. 

Narrator: That’s Melika Sebihi, who works in interpretation here at the Museums.

Sebihi: I studied Middle Eastern art history in school, and I myself am North African, so I'm really interested in portrayals of the Middle East. A lot of portrayals were through this very colonial lens and from a viewpoint where the artist was very much othering what they were seeing.

Narrator: Orientalism refers to a movement in which, following European colonialism, western artists and writers thought about and represented the “Orient” in stereotypical, sexualized and patronizing ways.

Gerome used objects and photographs collected on his travels, to stage scenes like this in his Paris studio. And the women he portrays as bather and attendant were likely paid models from the white working-class and Black French-Caribbean communities in Paris.

Emily Beeny: His skill as an illusionistic painter is part of what persuaded his contemporaries of the accuracy of what is in fact a total fantasy and a studio concoction.