Bachi-bouzouk noir

The title names a bashi-bazouk, an irregular soldier in the Ottoman army, the sort of unpaid mercenary with a fearsome reputation for looting and violence. None of that menace is here. Gérôme has posed a model with real dignity, wrapped in a striped silk tunic and layered fabrics, calm and upright. And the setting is a fiction. This was painted not in the East but in Gérôme's Paris studio, using costumes and props he had bought on a journey through the Near East in 1868. The mismatched, luxurious textiles carry the one bit of documentary truth, since real bashi-bazouks, unpaid and without a uniform, wore whatever finery they could gather on the march.