Moorish Bath 1885

Jean-Léon Gérôme painted *Moorish Bath* during a period of intense fascination in Europe with the “Orient." Gérôme was part of a wave of artists who exoticized North Africa and the Middle East. In this painting, we see a nude woman, presumably a Westerner, being attended to by a Black attendant in a hammam, or public bathhouse. This gaze was complicated as paintings of harems and bathhouses played into fantasies of colonial power and male dominance. The Western art world was also, of course, largely dominated by men. It's impossible to look at this painting now without considering how it perpetuated racial and gender stereotypes. What does it mean to see a Black woman, likely enslaved or hired as an exotic curiosity, in service to a white woman in a space that promises leisure and luxury? This dynamic carries a complex history of race and labor relations, and it's a history of both eroticization and subjugation.