The white slave (painting)
The white slave ( L'Esclave blanche ) is a 1888 Resulting paintings of Jean Lecomte du Nouy .
The representation of the harem or female-only hammams offered painters - based on Ingres - the opportunity to develop erotic fantasies. The young white slave is naked and smokes a cigarette calmly.
The decor is splendid: black servants with sparkling jewelry and shimmering clothes, countless accessories, a water basin that points to purity and sensual bathing joys in equal measure. This fictitious scene is also a winking reference to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' The Turkish Bath (1862).
Every detail is instrumentalized to evoke oriental magic. The calligraphic inscription on the gold frame reads: " Allah is great!"
The painting is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes .
literature
- Exhibition "L'Art Triomphant", Kunsthalle Kiel 2007.
- Esther Sabelus: The white slave. Media presentations of sexuality and the big city around 1900 . Panama, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-938714-05-8 .