Page "Orientalism" Paragraph 26

In many of these works, they portrayed the Orient as exotic, colorful and sensual, not to say stereotyped.

Such works typically concentrated on Oriental Islamic, Hebraic, and other Semitic cultures, as those were the ones visited by artists as France became more engaged in North Africa.

French artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted many works depicting Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques.

They stressed both lassitude and visual spectacle.

Other scenes, especially in genre painting, have been seen as either closely comparable to their equivalents set in modern-day or historical Europe, or as also reflecting an Orientalist mind-set in the Saidian sense of the term.

Gérôme was the precursor, and often the master, of a number of French painters in the later part of the century whose works were often frankly salacious, frequently featuring scenes in harems, public baths and slave auctions ( the last two also available with classical decor ), and responsible, with others, for " the equation of Orientalism with the nude in pornographic mode ".