Il mercato degli schiavi

Gérôme painted this in 1866, when France was expanding its empire across North Africa and audiences at home were hungry for scenes of an East imagined as strange and cruel. He shows a slave market. A naked woman stands at the centre while a buyer pushes his fingers into her mouth to check her teeth, the way you would inspect a horse. Gérôme gives it the cool, polished finish of a photograph, every tile and fold exact, which is part of what makes it so uncomfortable. It let French viewers feel morally superior to the society on the wall. What the Clark Art Institute points out is that Gérôme almost certainly never saw a market like this. He travelled in Egypt, but this scene was largely built in the studio, from imagination.