Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination

“Orientalism is only a phase in the cult of the Exotic,” wrote French art historian Philippe Jullian in his study on the genre of painting that scholars have, since the nineteenth century, commonly referred to as Orientalist.¹ In the most general sense Orientalist art, which was pioneered by the French and then developed by British and other European artists, refers to images of the life, history, and topography of the geographical area between Turkey, the Near East and the Arab peninsula, and North Africa. The large number of available exhibition catalogs bears testimony to the public’s persistent interest in Orientalist art, a genre that has also enjoyed sustained debate in scholarship. ² Regrettably, the contributions of lesser-known and specifically female artists remain to this day largely undocumented and unanalyzed. Overshadowed by the Delacroixs and Dinets in France, and the Lewises, Leightons, and Lears in Britain, sustained readings of the works and reception of female artists such as Henriette Browne and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, who feature in this essay, are still rare. This is an unfortunate omission, writes Roger Benjamin, as it is actually “the mass of less distinguished artists who most accurately characterize Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon.”³

If the quest for comprehensiveness and the rediscovery of forgotten (female) artists must remain a critical prerogative, it is equally important to review from time to time the critical frameworks used in existing analyses. And it is here—highlighted in Jullian’s quotation above—that this essay takes its methodological point of departure. In recent years, despite the necessity to use the term Orientalism to refer to the genre as a whole, critics have increasingly turned away from this critically and historically loaded term and toward the paradigm of “the exotic.”

Art historian Linda Nochlin first employed Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism in her analysis of the misrepresentations of the Orient in Gérôme’s Snake Charmer and Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus.⁴ Her observations on Gérôme’s realistic style, which seems to legitimize the painting’s subtext of Western cultural superiority, and on Delacroix’s fantasy about (Eastern) men’s power over (Eastern harem) women, remain forceful and valid. However, they are built on Said’s premise of the Western misrepresentation of the East and, a priori, the fixed binary opposition of West and East; two assumptions I want to scrutinize in this essay. Hence I am more attracted to the critical studies of Michel Thévoz, Olivier Richon, Peter Mason, and Frederic Bohrer, who, in their readings of Orientalist art, replace the stable binaries of Orientalism with the oscillating, in-between, hybrid, and often paradoxical features of the exotic.

What emerges as more crucial in Thévoz, Richon, Mason, and Bohrer than the paintings’ ideological underpinnings of an East-West dichotomy is that the painterly exotic is, from the outset, unstable. In these critics’ view this precariousness results from the constant conflict and negotiation between object/ scene and artistic process, or the painter’s objective, documentary agenda to paint the Orient and her subjective, creative desire for compositions. If Nochlin’s Saidian analysis looks primarily to an external and political reality to read the iconography of Orientalist art, the other critics alter the order of importance: while not completely discarding the relevance of politics and ideas for portrayals of geographical and cultural difference, they highlight the intrinsic artistic transformations that flow into these paintings as representations.

Let me elaborate on these critics’ celebration of exoticism as a useful critical paradigm for Orientalist paintings and also introduce my own approach to Browne’s and Jerichau-Baumann’s Orientalist, or as I would prefer to call them, exoticist paintings. Unfortunately, like (Saidian) Orientalism, exoticism has been misapplied as a concept in discussions of the Orientalist genre, even by well-known curators.⁵ However, in its best and most productive critical usage it follows the following trajectory: Mason writes, in Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic, that the exotic is nothing but a “representational effect.”⁶ Exoticism is not an essence or quality that is innate to, or resides “in...