Fabio Fabbi

Fabio Fabbi enjoyed a long and commercially prosperous career. He studied at the Florence Academy where he later taught. A trip to Egypt in the 1880s would determine the direction of his entire artistic output: scenes of life in North Africa and Egypt painted in a luminous, impressionistic manner, a style which lent itself well to the bright light and vivid colours of the Mediterranean sun.

Here, a group of girls assemble on a loggia overlooking the cascading whitewashed skyline of Tangier or Algiers. Quite possibly Fabbi staged his composition to evoke the sanctuary of the harem, literally the ‘prohibited place’, which would never have been accessible to a male artist (critic Théophile Gautier famously declared in 1861 that only women should bother travelling to the Orient, as a male tourist's experience would necessarily be so much more limited).

But even if Fabbi has imagined the scene, he has done so in a respectful and considered manner, depicting the harem not in a voyeuristic way as some Western artists were wont to do, but as the sophisticated social space that it really was. The comfortable lavish interior, sumptuous furs, fabrics, and rugs, topped by an ornate mashrabiye canopy tells of a prosperous and harmonious household in which the women commune, gossip, take tea, and are entertained together.