O Mercado de Escravos

Vernet painted this in 1836, a few years after France invaded Algeria in 1830 and he himself traveled to Algiers in 1833. Scenes like it fed a growing French appetite for images of the Middle East and North Africa, and Vernet, one of the most successful painters in Paris, supplied them. It shows a slave market, with a seated merchant and an enslaved woman being examined by a prospective buyer who tips her head back to see her face. Whatever Vernet saw or imagined on his travels, the picture was made for a Paris salon audience as an exotic subject rather than a report. It is a small canvas, and it now hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.