JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME | Jeune fille du Caire

Possibly, Ernest Gambart or Henry Wallis, London (by 1871; as An Eastern Girl or Femme au/du Caire)

Goupil & Cie., New York

Possibly, Williams and Everett, Boston (purchased from the above on 15 April 1872, as Femme du Caire) 

George Mc Culloch, London (by 1896, as An Eastern Girl)

Possibly, Sale: Christie's, London, 17 November 1961

Shickman Gallery, New York (by 1970)

Sale: Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, 25 February 1982, lot 123 (as Arab Girl in a Doorway)

Mathaf Gallery, London

Purchased from the above

Goupil stock book 5, no. 5419, p. 123

Goupil stock book 5, no. 6402, p. 217

Athenaeum, 8 April 1871, p. 439 (as An Eastern Girl)

The Art-Journal, 1 May 1871, p. 145 (as An Eastern Girl)

The Art-Journal, vol. 58, 1896, p. 20, illustrated (as engraving), p. 21, described (as An Eastern Girl)

Gerald M. Ackerman & Richard Ettinghausen, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dayton, Ohio, 1972, p.19, illustrated (as An Arab Girl in a Doorway)

Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 1986, pp. 232-33, no. 229, catalogued & illustrated (as Arab Girl in Doorway/Jeune Fille arabe dans un passage and dated 1873)

Philip Hook and Mark Poltimore, Popular 19th Century Painting, A Dictionary of European Genre Painters, Antique Collectors' Club, Suffolk, 1986, p. 360, catalogued & illustrated

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 141, described (and dated 1873); p. 152c, catalogued & illustrated

Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Paris, 2000, pp. 282-83, no. 229, catalogued & illustrated (as Jeune Fille arabe dans un passage and dated 1873)

Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2003, p. 26, fig. 8, catalogued & illustrated

Painted in 1873, this work belongs to the series of paintings Gérôme made of Egyptian almehs (courtesan entertainers) in the 1870s and 1880s. In these works, almehs posed for half or full-length portraits, in interiors or leaning from a balcony window, performing dances or, as here, soliciting the viewer in kasbah alleyways. Her face thinly veiled, and wearing a diaphanous blouse and silk Ottoman-style pantaloons, she gazes alluringly at the viewer while holding a long wooden shibuk against her hip. Behind her, a hooded woman shrouded in darkness approaches beneath a broken mashrabiye screen. 

Gérôme's composition Dance of the Almeh (1863, Dayton Art Institute) marked an important early appearance of the type in his oeuvre; he later had the chance to observe and study almeh girls on his visit to the Fayoum oasis in 1868. His travelling companion Paul Lenoir recorded their encounter in his description of their travels published in 1872 and Gérôme’s brother-in-law Albert Goupil took photographs of them. Gérôme even bargained for items of their clothing, which could be worn by his models on his return to France. He painted a whole series of pictures of almehs in the next few years, all of them shown wearing the same full silk trousers and diaphanous blouses. Often these paintings were single-figure compositions with the model staring seductively at the viewer. 

We are grateful to Dr Emily M. Weeks for her assistance in cataloguing this work which will be included in her revision of the artist's catalogue raisonné by Gerald M. Ackerman.