Among the most commercially successful 19th-century French artists, Gérôme built his reputation as an “Orientalist” painter with works like “Moorish Bath,” constructed scenes set in colonial North Africa or the Ottoman Empire and laced with the artist’s own inventions and fantasies. While Gérôme traveled from France, a Western colonizing power, to Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Turkey during his career—returning to Paris with numerous sketches, objects, and items of costume—this private scene of a woman’s bath is a scene he surely never witnessed, and instead was likely staged and executed in his studio. Because of his travels and his ability to depict exacting detail using a meticulous, polished technique, Gérôme’s paintings were often deceptively endorsed as authentic depictions, obscuring the ways in which the artist and artwork were complicit in contributing to the Western ideological construct of the “Orient.” While Gérôme expertly renders texture and surface—vibrant, nearly iridescent draped textiles, intricately patterned tilework, gleaming metal water basin—he also exploits the racial difference between the two enslaved women: the pale, red-headed nude bather (likely Circassian) and her African attendant, both subjugated female bodies presented for consumption.

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