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Social Sharing
The Bath
Though the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme made multiple voyages to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean—and painted many pictures inspired by his travels—his work draws at least as much from fantasy and stereotype as from observation. Superb technical skills allowed him to conjure the scenes he painted with a seductive realism, here evident in the treatment of wet tile, rumpled cloth, and bare skin. Relying on sketches, photographs, and props brought back from various corners of the Ottoman Empire, Gérôme painted such scenes in the comfort of his Paris studio, hiring local models to act out the roles of women in an imaginary harem.
In reality, as a man and an outsider, Gérôme could never have entered a space like the one depicted here. The harem was a private area reserved for women, children, and domestic workers (whether paid or enslaved) in wealthy Ottoman households. In the nineteenth-century European imagination, however, harems formed an object of prurient curiosity and the locus of imagined Eastern otherness, defined by luxury, sensuality, and cruelty. While both figures depicted here could be free or enslaved members of a harem Gérôme's composition imposes a racialized social hierarchy (white bather vs. Black attendant) characteristic of European thinking in the period. Of course the real-life women playing both roles were likely professional models from Northern Paris, home in the later nineteenth century to significant working-class and French-Caribbean populations. Deeply informed by racist ideology and the French colonial enterprise, Gérôme's harem paintings belong to a genre known as Orientalism.
-Emily A. Beeny
Curator Emily Beeny, radio journalist Hana Baba, and interpretation outreach associate Melika Sebihi on “The Bath”
Gallery 17
- Artist
- Jean-Léon Gérôme
- Title
- The Bath
- Date
- ca. 1880-1885
- Place of Creation
- France
- Object Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 29 x 23 1/2 in. (73.7 x 59.7 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection
- Accession Number
- 1961.29
