Painted in 1876, the year after Gérôme's extended visit to Constantinople, the small format of A Veiled Beauty belies its jewel-like qualities and the power of the sitter's expression. A young woman looks out at the viewer from behind her diaphanous yasmak (a veil comprised of two pieces of fabric). The sheerness of the yasmak was a recent trend in Constantinople, inspired by the bared visages of European women in public. Although clearly set indoors, it appears that the woman wears a tailored green ferace (outdoor cloak) as well, over her brocaded yellow anteri. As one contemporary traveller to Constantinople had observed: 'The feridjes [sic] ... of the wealthy are of fine cloth or silk, the younger and more fashionable ladies affecting light tints such as pink or lilac, often with trimmings of lace on the rectangular cape, and the elderly ladies more sober tints' (Lucy Garnett, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, London, 1890-1, I, pp. 429-30).

The visit of Empress Eugenie to Constantinople in 1869 changed women's costumes in the city forever. Following her stay, French fashion magazines were widely circulated - even within the harem - and dresses were ordered directly from Paris or commissioned from seamstresses in Pera, in emulation of the colourful European styles. As elements of European fashion were selectively adopted and combined with traditional Turkish dress, a hybrid style emerged - one that did not conform to the exotic imaginings of European artists and travellers. Rather than ignoring this sartorial shift, as most nineteenth-century Orientalist painters did, Gérôme - along with his Turkish contemporary and host in Constantinople, the French-trained artist Osman Hamdy Bey - transformed it into an elegant and attractive genre. His images of Turkish women represent the actualities of indoor and outdoor dress in Constantinople, and do so in spectacularly beautiful fashion.

A Veiled Beauty thus eloquently combines the subjects and techniques of two distinctly different worlds. On the one hand veiled and demure, holding a traditional ebony-handled horse-hair fly swat and resting her arm on a Turkish rug, yet the model engages confidently with the viewer and looks us in the eye. Rather than being the object of our gaze, we become the subject of hers. Such nuances reflect that Gérôme's paintings are not merely picturesque records of fact. In their intensive examination of changing fashion trends and their persistent focus on the physical and intellectual liberties that women exercised, they become political documents. Paintings such as this are an attempt by the artist to challenge European assumptions about the cloistering of Ottoman women within the private sphere in Islamic society.