Le Marché d'esclaves

Gérôme finished this in 1871, a few years after the United States had fought a war to end slavery. In Ottoman Egypt, where he had travelled and filled sketchbooks, the trade in enslaved people was still running, and he painted one of its markets with the cool, near-photographic finish that made his reputation. Figures stand waiting to be sold while buyers look them over. Salon audiences in Paris could study the scene as exotic spectacle, its polished surface holding the subject at a comfortable distance. Gérôme went back to Egypt many times, and the flat, even daylight here owes as much to those trips as to anything in a Paris studio.