| The Slave Market | |
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| 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 artistJean-Léon Gérôme. It depicts a Middle Eastern or North African setting where a man inspects the teeth of a nude, female Abyssinian slave in the context of theBarbary slave trade.
The painting was bought byAdolphe Goupil on 23 August 1866 and exhibited at theSalon in 1867. It was bought and sold several times untilRobert Sterling Clark bought it in 1930. Since 1955 it is part of theClark Art Institute's collection.[1]
Along with Gérôme'sThe Snake Charmer (also owned by the Clark),The Slave Market has become an iconic example of 19th-centuryorientalist art.[1]
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]
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In an art historical context,carem 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 predatedThe 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 inThe Slave Market of 1871); in all cases a woman or women are for sale, with men as buyers or sellers, but in the background ofThe Slave Market buyers can be seen inspecting a nude, dark-skinned male, and in the background ofSlave 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 isCave Canem (1881). In ancient Rome, a chained and collared man sits under the notice "Cave Canem", Latin for "Beware the Dog".
The right-wing political partyAlternative for Germany used the painting in a political advert for the2019 European Parliament election. The reprint was accompanied with the slogan "Europeans vote AfD!" and "So Europe doesn't becomeEurabia!"[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] TheClark Art Institute denounced AfD's use of the painting strongly.[6]
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![Victor Giraud [fr], Un marchand d'esclaves, 1867, Musée d'Orsay](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aFran%25C3%25A7oise_Foliot_-_Victor_Giraud_-_Un_marchand_d%2527esclaves.jpg)
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Media related toThe Slave Market (Gerome) at Wikimedia Commons| Paintings |
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