The Slave Market (Gérôme painting)

The Slave Market
The Slave Market
Artist	Jean-Léon Gérôme
Year	1866
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	84.6 cm × 63.3 cm (33.3 in × 24.9 in)
Location	Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

The Slave Market (French: Le Marché d'esclaves) is an 1866 painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. It depicts a Middle Eastern or North African setting where a man inspects the teeth of a nude, female Caucasian slave in the context of the Barbary slave trade.

The painting was bought by Adolphe Goupil on 23 August 1866 and exhibited at the Salon in 1867. It was bought and sold several times until Robert Sterling Clark bought it in 1930. Since 1955 it is part of the Clark Art Institute's collection.^[1]

Along with Gérôme's The Snake Charmer (also owned by the Clark), The Slave Market has become an iconic example of 19th-century orientalist art.^[1]

Reception

Maxime Du Camp, who had travelled extensively in the Near East, reviewed the painting from the 1867 Salon. He located the motif to Cairo's slave market and described the painting as "a scene done on the spot".^[1] Du Camp wrote:

It is one of these [more expensive] women, an Abyssinian, that M. Gérôme has taken as the principal figure of his composition. She is nude and being displayed by the djellab, who has the fine head of a brigand accustomed to every sort of abduction and violence; the idea of the eternal soul must not very often have tormented such a bandit. The poor girl is standing, submissive, humble, resigned, with a fatalistic passivity that the painter has very skillfully rendered.^[1]^[2]

Race, gender, and sexuality

In an art historical context, Harem scenes depicted domestic spaces for the women in the Muslim societies; the males were only included in barbaric and sexual relations. This painting presents an unspecific Middle Eastern or North African setting in which a man inspects the teeth of a nude Caucasian^[3] female slave.

Gérome's depictions of slave trading predated The Slave Market and some were set in the Classical world. He painted a very similar scene in 1857, Buying a Slave, set in the ancient Greek or Roman world, in which racial differences between buyer, seller, and slave are not as apparent.^[1] The slaves depicted sometimes vary in skin color (as in The Slave Market of 1871); in all cases a woman or women are for sale, with men as buyers or sellers, but in the background of The Slave Market buyers can be seen inspecting a nude, dark-skinned male, and in the background of Slave Market in Ancient Rome (c. 1884) two enslaved males, one black and one white, can be seen.

A depiction by Gérôme of a slave in another context is Cave Canem (1881). In ancient Rome, a chained and collared man sits under the notice "Cave Canem," Latin for "Beware the Dog."

Use in media

2019 European elections

The right-wing political party Alternative for Germany used the painting in a political advert for the 2019 European Parliament election. The reprint was accompanied with the slogan "Europeans vote AfD!" and "So Europe doesn't become Eurabia!"^[4] Deutsche Welle reported how the painting was used with racist intent, in that it suggestively depicted dark-skinned men with beards and turbans "inspecting the teeth of a nude white woman".^[5] The Clark Art Institute denounced AfD's use of the painting strongly.^[6]

Gallery: Gérôme's depictions of slaves and slave markets

Detail from The Slave Market (1866) showing an enslaved dark-skinned male
Greek Slave (1870), an unfinished (due to theft) painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Slave Market (1871), Cincinnati Art Museum
Cave Canem, 1881, Musée Georges-Garret
Studies for Slave Market in Ancient Rome (above) and A Roman Slave Market (below), Walters Art Museum
Study for Slave Market in Ancient Rome, graphite and black crayon (c. 1884), Walters Art Museum
Study for Slave Market in Ancient Rome, oil on canvas, Musée Georges-Garret
Slave Market in Ancient Rome (c. 1884), Hermitage Museum
A Roman Slave Market (c. 1884), Walters Art Museum

Gallery: Other Academic and Orientalist depictions of slave markets

Victor Giraud [fr], Un marchand d'esclaves, 1867, Musée d'Orsay
Gustave Boulanger, The Slave Market, 1886, private collection
Oscar Pereira da Silva, Escrava Romana, c. 1894
Otto Pilny, The Slave Market, 1910

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Lees, Sarah, ed. (2012). Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (excerpt: "The Slave Market") (PDF). pp. 359–363.
^ Hering, Fanny Field (1892). Gérôme: The Life and Works of Jean Léon Gérôme. New York: Cassell. p. 117.
^ Davis, Professor Robert (2003). Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800. Ohio USA: Pangrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-333-71966-4.
^ "U.S. Museum Condemns Far-right German Party for Using Their Painting for anti-Muslim Campaign". Haaretz. May 1, 2019. Archived from the original on April 25, 2020. Retrieved May 10, 2019.
^ "AfD in hot water with US museum over campaign billboard". Deutsche Welle. April 26, 2019.
^ Hickley, Catherine (30 April 2019). "US museum criticises use of Gérôme's Slave Market in German right-wing campaign". The Art Newspaper.

External links

The Slave Market Archived 2016-05-22 at the Wayback Machine at the Clark Art Institute's website
Jean-Léon Gérôme: Slave Market by Sarah Lees from Nineteenth-century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, pp. 359–363.
Media related to The Slave Market (Gerome) at Wikimedia Commons