The Light of the Harem (private collection) was painted in 1880 and depicts a woman arranging a scarf of Damascus silk around her hair while looking into a mirror held by a younger girl. It was one of the first appearances of Leighton's most celebrated model, Ada Alice Pullan who was known by her stage-name, Dorothy Dene. The model for the younger girl is sometimes identified as Connie Gilchrist, a girl who had been 'discovered' as she worked as a skipping-rope dancer at the Gaiety Theatre and who later became Countess Orkney. She posed for many artists including Leighton, Frith, Whistler and Frank Holl. She was the model for Little Fatima (private collection), The Daphnephoria (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) and Winding the Skein (Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney). However it is more likely that the model for The Light of the Harem was Dorothy Dene's younger sister Lena who replaced Connie as Leighton's favourite child-model around this time. The poses of the figures in The Light of the Harem were devised for two figures in one of the two huge lunettes that Leighton painted for the South Kensington Museum between 1878 and 1880, The Arts of Industry Applied to Peace.