El mercado de esclavos

Gustave Boulanger belonged to a generation of French academic painters who dressed the eroticism the Salon liked in the respectable costume of ancient history. He had travelled in Italy, Greece and North Africa, and painted this scene of a slave sale in ancient Rome around the early 1880s. When it was shown at the Paris Salon of 1886 it carried a drier title, roughly a slave dealer at Rome, but viewers soon called it simply the slave market. Seven figures stand exposed for sale, from children to young adults, several resembling one another closely enough to read as a single family. The careful archaeology of the setting, the poses, the pale skin under a hard light, was exactly the polish that won Salon medals. The picture is now in a private collection and rarely seen in public.