The Slave Market

A persistent trend in the fine and decorative arts throughout the nineteenth century, Orientalism explored themes and motifs drawn from exotic, non-European cultures as a foil to the “civilized” world of nineteenth-century Europe. Orientalist scenes represented the antithesis of modern urban realities and offered an atmospheric escape into the simpler world of a fabricated past. These paintings were not realist documents, but romantic reveries, evoking passion, eroticism, primitivism and danger, but at a comfortable remove.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was the most important and influential Orientalist painter in France. His painterly style is highly realistic, with precisely rendered faces, bodies, buildings, and landscapes. Among his most typical subjects were exoticized, eroticized scenes of slave girls, harems, and other images that stereotyped “the Orient” as a locus of mystery, sensuality, decadence, and savagery.

Slavery and slave markets were still in operation in Egypt in the 1870s, and Gérôme may have witnessed one during his many travels in the area. He portrays the wretched despair of the slaves waiting to be sold, but lingers on their sensual poses and the completely nude body of one of the women. This allowed both painter and viewer to condemn the savage trade in humans by humans, but also to fantasize about its sexual possibilities—a risqué mix of pity and lust.