The White Slave

Lecomte du Nouÿ showed this at the Paris Salon of 1888, at the height of a French appetite for imagined scenes of the Ottoman East. He had trained under Gérôme and traveled through Greece, Turkey and Egypt, and like his teacher he finished everything with an almost photographic smoothness. The setting is a fantasy bath, the kind of interior most of his Paris viewers would never see and much of which was invented in the studio. A young woman sits nude beside a hookah, the tiled wall behind her rendered tile by tile. Pictures like this sold on the promise of showing a private, far-off world, though the world on the canvas was largely assembled from travel sketches and studio props.