From the harem to Salomé: American Orientalism Painting as an Exploration of Changing

Women’s Roles in the 19th Century

In his 1580 essay, “On Presumption,” French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote:

… It is that I lower the value of the things I possess, because I possess them, and raise the value of things when they are foreign, absent, or not mine… between two similar works I should always decide against my own…ownership, of itself, breeds contempt of what we hold and control. i

Fascination and appropriation of all things foreign pervades our culture even today. This

was recently illustrated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit “China:

Through the Looking Glass” which opened June 2015 and examined the impact of Chinese

culture on Western fashion. More commonplace, consider the preponderance of restaurants

featuring international cuisines adjusted to American palates, studios teaching yoga and

mediation, shops selling Navajo sand paintings and Indian glass bangles. By nature, we are

intrigued and interested in what is different from us, and we integrate them into familiar media as

a way to make them more accessible to us, if not necessarily more understandable.

This is what consitutes modern-day American Orientalism. The meaning of the term

“Orientalism” has changed radically over the past forty years. Originally, it simply meant the

study of Eastern (Moroccan to Japanese) languages, customs, religions, not just for the sake of

scholarship but also to inform imperial foreign policy. However, Edward Said’s seminal 1978

book Orientalism defined it as a construction of stereotypes and myths about the Middle East

and Islamic North Africa created by imperial European powers in order to justify dominance and

power.ii In this vein, Linda Nochlin describes Orientalism as selective visions of the Middle

East in order to emphasize the “Otherness” of Arab colonials as lustful, tyrannical, and

backwardiii, as a way to justify European involvement over the politics, culture, religion, and

economies of the Middle East.

In contrast to the European powers during the 19th and early 20th century who were

involved in ensuring a balance of power amongst themselves played out in Africa, the Middle

East, and Asia; U.S. foreign policy was focused initially on expansion into the Western part of

the continent (culminating in the annexation of Hawaii in 1898), and then consolidating a sphere

of influence which included the Phillippines and Latin America by the early 20th century.

However in American popular culture, there was also a clear interest in the Middle East in the

arts that paralleled that of Europe, which flowered into the Orientalism movement.

What separates American Orientalism from European Orientalism, though, is how

depictions of the Middle East was used as a response and exploration of the status of women in

American society. By painting Western women in Middle Eastern garb or Middle Eastern

women in their own culture, Orientalism became a way to respond and to explore American

values, affirm them in comparison to “Oriental” values, and analyze the shift from

Colonial/Victorian ideas to post-industrial mores of female behavior.

For both men and women, dressing up in Middle Eastern garb was part of a game, in one

could acquire another personality and a desirable, forbidden, and mysterious experienceiv, which

explains its popularity as masquerade costumes. Copley’s Mrs. Thomas Gage (Margaret

Kemble) (Fig. 1) is one of the first American examples of the use of Turkish garb in order to

respond to the behavior standards that American women were supposed to live up to—ie,

fashionable and wealthy and in imitation of their English rulers. In England at this time,

turquerie—dressing as Turkish elite-- was extremely popular among the ruling class. Mrs. Gage

is pictured in a turban and a red taffeta robe with a high blue belt, draped over a camelback sofa

like a harem girl, but the 18th-century dress peeking out from under her robe and the brass tacks

of the sofa squarely put this portrait in a wealthy European context. Among English women,

dressing up as a harem woman was, as Stiati puts it, one of the “most exotic and…liberal” roles

they could play.v They could express their individuality in a socially acceptable way, and in garb

more comfortable than what conventions dictated. Unlike her cosmopolitan British counterparts,

who could at least dress up in Turkish costume publicly, Mrs. Gage chose this mode of dress this

expressly for her portrait, in the only context acceptable in the more provincial American

colonies. Since the Crusades, Near Eastern luxuries have been present in the trappings of wealthy

Europeans: silks, taffetas, damasks, carpets, steel, spices, brass, among others. So, for wealthy

colonial Americans, what better way to identify with the status quo than to be pictured wearing

fine Near Eastern fabrics fashioned into Turkish garb?

Fast-forwarding to 1908, the American painter John Singer Sargent’s Almina, Daughter

of Arthur Wertheimer (Fig. 2) does the same thing. In this painting, Sargent lent Almina, the

daughter of a wealthy British Jew, in a Turkish jacket and posed with a sarod to make her look

like a harem slave. As a matter of course, Sargent liked to paint his Jewish sitters with Oriental

objects, to allude to their exotic origins. Almina’s jacket is wearing is actually a man’s jacket,

and the sarod she is holding is from India, not the Near East, and she is holding it incorrectlyvi

But like Mrs. Thomas Gage, the Middle Eastern clothing permits Almina to take on a glamorous

persona that would be appreciated by her peers, in line with what was fashionable, but

completely outside of her day-to-day life in upper-class England.

However, reflective of their times, both Mrs. Thomas Gage and Almina reflect what

society at large considered a woman’s role—largely decorative. However, the Industrial

Revolution in the 19th century enabled many women to work for the first time, move to cities,

live by themselves, and socialize with men unchaperonedvii. Many people at the time were

concerned about the changing role of women and the erosion of Victorian values that resulted.

Along with the slum conditions, prostitution was on the rise in citiesviii and became a focus of

social reform movements, along with women’s suffrage, which was set aside by suffragettes

themselves to focus on the abolition movement which was rapidly increasing in popularity.

American Orientalism painting during this time then became a way to explore changing

relationships with men, by first looking at societies that segregated men and women even more

stringently than Victorian America. As Victorian rules began to relax, Americans looked to

many cultures, including Middle East, to see how men and women interacted to explore other

options.

Depictions of women in Orientalist painting fell into a gradient between the object of

men’s fantasy and the woman as unabashedly controlling men. However, these concepts were

mainly visualized in the context of the harem. It is interesting to note how the word “harem” has

been misused and stereotyped, particularly by male European Orientalists. Even to unacquainted

men now, the word conjures up images of luxurious quarters filled with scores of female slaves.

It was this misconception of the harem that caused many European countries smugly pointed out

that their way of life infinitely superior and therefore, should be exported and enforced in the

Middle East.

The word “harem” comes from the Arabic word haraam, which means “forbidden,” and

refers to simply the women’s quarters of the house, per strict Islamic rules separating the sexes.

It was not just a playground for the wealthy sultans, but the social sphere for women, as well as

the center of home life in Arab cultures, ix where all the women of the household lived. This idea

of the harem as its true meaning, is depicted in Frederick Arthur Bridgman, for example, does so

in The Siesta, painted in 1878 (Fig. 3). Bridgman, a student of the French Orientalist Gérôme, is

quoting his teacher in the pose and setting of this painting—a young girl stretched out on a sofa.

But unlike his instructor’s version of this, the girl is fully dressed and asleep.x She is alone, and

the jungle outside her window indicates exoticism, danger or nature, and the monkey was often a

symbol of base desires. The door is partially open, either to suggest accessibility or vulnerability.

This painting is similar to the iconography of the “American girl” that was popular after the Civil

War, which was used to confirm gender stereotypes—young, vulnerable, attractive. And like her

American counterparts, she is sequestered (or assumed to be) in her house. What may account

for this paradigm shift is that Bridgman actually had become acquainted with an Algerian widow

during the course of his travels,xi which meant he was able to depict women as they truly lived, in

a way that was more appealing to more conservative American tastes.

This access to his widow friend’s household meant that Bridgman did domestic scenes

that had strong parallels to Victorian womanhood. The Bath, done in 1890 (Fig. 4), is one such

painting, and more like Mary Cassatt’s The Bath than Gérôme’s painting of the same name. This

painting elevates Muslim women to the status of a loving motherxii, a value expressed in America

as well. The concept of American motherhood, far from being contrasted with Oriental types, is

actually universalized. The woman is in complete control of her space right now, not answerable

to some absent man, but completely in her own element as a mother, smiling lovingly at her

mischievous child.

Most men could only imagine what the harem was like on the inside. Fumée d’Ambre

Gris (1880), and The Chess Game (1907) both by Sargent, are two such paintings done from the

imagination. For Sargent, as well as many other painters, Middle East served as a challenge: the

light, the different colors, and textures, and the physical challenge of dragging around paint

supplies and easels in the hot desert, and having certain spaces completely off-limits to him as a

man. He dismissed his widely popular painting, Fumée d’Ambre Gris (1880) (Fig. 5) with “a

little picture I perpetrated in Tangiers… the only interest of the thing was the colour.” On some

level, this painting was a way for Sargent to simply show his mastery of skill. It is a study of a

figure in white on a white background, which one of the most technically difficult techniques to

master in portraiture. Her hands, jewelry, and the tiles are very detailed; the rest of it is dissolved

in broad brushstrokes.

But the mystery of the subject is hard to deny, and Sargent , as well as his audience, was

fascinated by the mysterious and exotic interiors.xiii Unlike Bridgman’s woman in The Siesta, this

woman is not inviting or vulnerable. Her hands are held up high, and she completely dominates

the activity in this painting, which is perfuming her clothes with ambergris.xiv Though this may

be perfectly ordinary chore to be doing in Algeria, Sargent imbues the activity with a sense of

ritual and theatricality, with a woman in the center of it.

These paintings of domestic interiors are almost nostalgic in their sense of domesticity

and Victorian propriety, that was fast fading in the wake of women’s liberation. To some, they

must have seemed to echo a simpler time in American life, when men and women occupied two

very separate spaces. In all three paintings, the emphasis is not on the “different,” but instead on

the familiar, which emphasized that at least some American feminine values are also Oriental

values: vulnerability and domesticity. During her travels, American Orientalist Ella Pell sadly

made note that American women, like their Middle Eastern counterparts, were essentially

enslaved by being kept inside in the home. As the women’s suffragette movement began to

become more mainstream , male painters like Frank Swain Gifford countered,that those Middle

Eastern women being painted were being kept as actual slaves, so he didn’t understand why

American women complained about their lack of voting rights.xv Either way, Orientalist

paintings became a way to call attention to this growing domestic issue and a starting off point

for a larger cultural discussion.

As industrialization began to prompt many women in the U.S. to leave their homes for

the cities, to live by themselves and freely socialize with men, an interest grew in how men and

women in other cultures interacted. The Chess Game (Fig. 6), done in 1907 by Sargent, is one of

the few examples of American Oriental paintings in which men and women socialize. Again, like

Fumée d’Ambre Gris, this is a technical study in cosmopolitan style, this time in the figures

dominating the landscape, merging of patterns, compression of space, and loose brushwork. But

unlike the other Orientalist paintings we have seen, this one is completely staged, was done in

Switzerland with models and costumes. Though it is not a harem setting, the audience can

assume that the game is taking place in some part of the harem, simply by the default of having a

female subject. They are outdoors, in a flower garden, and the woman is wearing a veil that

covers the bottom half of her face.

What makes this picture also fascinating is the chess game being played. Chess was a

familiar parlor game in America, and was considered to be as intellectual and sophisticated as it

is now. So, in this vein, showing two Arabs playing chess elevates them to be just as intelligent

and worldly as Americans who play chess. And here is a woman, mirroring the pose of her

competitor, which suggests she is holding her own in the game and that she is his intellectual

equal as well.

Brian T. Allen suggests that gaming imagery may also be a way to address social

conventions. To see a man and woman together, playing a game and socializing, was considered

to be overly romantic to Victorians. It partly reflects what advocates of the women’s suffrage

movement were calling for, the expansion of the boundaries of society to include women as

equalsxvi in all spheres of public life, as they were the intellectual equals of men. To make such

an image respectable, it would have to be removed from a Western context and placed into an

Eastern one.

In any case, both Bridgman and Sargent, though painting in completely different styles,

painted only largely decorative female figures. Whether vulnerable or powerful or equal in the

harem to men, the fact of the matter is, these women are in the harem and must stay there, or be

veiled in front of male company. They are, as Holly Edwards puts it, “proper, beautiful, and

reticent,” as American women should bexvii, very much in the vein of Mrs. Thomas Gage and

Almina earlier.

Ella Pell, a female Orientalist, painted women very differently from her peers Sargent

and Bridgman. Though her attitude about Middle East was condescending at bestxviii, she was

happy to be free of social expectations back homexix, and was able to paint and travel as she

liked. Her Salomé (1890) shows a self-assured, solidly built, peasant woman from the Bible who

has Herod’s desires and John the Baptist’s life under her control. She is in complete control of

her space and story, and defiantly unveiled, unlike the spiteful femme fatale depicted by other

artists and writers. What is interesting is that Ella Pell, as a woman, would have greater access to

harems than her male peers, she very rarely painted women in the domestic setting and pointedly

tried to paint subjects more like the ones her male peers would more likely to have had access to.

The Middle East, despite being mysterious and exotic, was something that was instantly

recognizable, if not completely understood, by the standard American audience that had been fed

images of the Middle East by literature, theater, and music for centuries. For example, Louis

Comfort Tiffany’s (1848-1933) paintings of Arab horsemen in the desert strongly echoed those

his contemporaries painted romanticizing the cowboys of the American West. The Middle East

was fascinating, beautiful, and simply different for Americans. For this reason, it was an

appropriate context in which women and men could respond to the constraints that society placed

on women. When industrialization and relaxation of Victorian mores permitted a freer mixing of

the sexes, Middle East again became a way to explore the spectrum of women’s behavior, from

the pretty, vulnerable domestic to a powerful, controlling force. By putting issues physically into

another place, it became easier to explore and experiment with women’s status, ahead of the

coming wave of women’s liberation movements.

Fig. 1. John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815. Mrs. Thomas Gage, 1771. Oil on canvas. Timken Museum of Art; San Diego, CA.

Fig. 2. John Singer Sargent, Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer, 1908. Oil on canvas. Tate Britain; London.

Fig. 3. Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The Siesta, 1878. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Fig. 4. Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The Bath, 1890. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Fig 5. John Singer Sargent, Fumée d’ambre gris, 1880. Oil on canvas. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute: Williamstown, MA.

Fig. 6. John Singer Sargent, The Chess Game, 1907. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

i Michel de Montaigne, “On Presumption,” in Donald M. Frame, trans. Selected Essays (New York: Walter J. Black, 1943), p. 130.ii John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), xii. iii Ibid., p. 46.iv Oleg Graber, “Roots and Others,” in Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 9.v Paul Stiati, “Character and Class: The Portraits of John Singleton Copley,” in Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds. Reading American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 26.vi Trevor Fairbrother. John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p.89. vii Holly Edwards, “A Million and One Nights: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930,” in Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 40.viii Edwards, “A Million and One Nights,” p. 41. ix Mary Roberts, “Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem, in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds. Orientalism’s Interlocuters: Painting, Architecture, and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 180. x Brian T. Allen, “‘The garments of instruction from the wardrobe of pleasure’: American Orientalist Painting in the 1870s and 1880s,” in Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University, p. 73.xi Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 132. xii Allen, “‘The garments,’” p. 73.xiii Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent, p. 53.xiv Ibid.,p. 135.xv Edwards, “A Million and One Nights,” p. 33. xvi Edwards, Noble Dreams, p. 134. xvii Edwards, “A Million and One Nights,” p. 14. xviii Ibid., p. 143.xix Ibid., p. 144.