The Slave Market (Gérôme painting)
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". 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. 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 female slave. Women were depicted with a passive sexuality, while the men were depicted as domineering and disrespectful towards women. 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. 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." 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!" "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". The Clark Art Institute denounced AfD's use of the painting strongly.
Reception
The Slave Market () is an 1866 painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.