Harem Venuses: Before Punishment by Franz Eisenhut

Before Punishment (1890)

The harem was a very popular subject with Victorian period painters, offering, as it did, an opportunity to depict sensuously abandoned looking women but with an historical or ethnic justification.  Naked dancers, women bathing and women smoking were all lasciviously depicted by artists keen to feed the public fascination as to what really went on in those mysterious eastern harems.  This example, Before Punishment (sometimes known as Before the Verdict) includes two sinuously stretched out women with an added S&M element, as both are locked in wooden stocks around their ankles.  One is white and redheaded (the Victorians were fascinated by white slaves taken into harems) and the other dusky.  What have they been up to to be punished?  The stocks appear again in the same artist's picture, Captive in the Harem.

Captive in the harem

Both were painted by Austro-Hungarian (born in Novo Palanka, in what is now Serbia) artist Franz Eisenhut (1857-1903).  His father wanted him to become a merchant but a Hungarian painter spotted his drawing talent and prominent citizens of his home town collected money to fund his studies in Budapest and Munich. He travelled in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus and became an orientalist painter, principally.

Polish Venus: The Rest by Wojciech Gerson

Here is a totally sumptuous nude by the Polish painter Wojciech Gerson (1831-1901). Born in Warsaw he worked and studied there most of his life, except for a two year period of study in St Petersburg.  He enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of Warsaw at the age of just thirteen and graduated at the age of nineteen.

Festivities on Midsummer Night (1897)

Well known in Poland today, for his mountain landscapes and patriotic paintings, many of his works were stolen by the Germans in World War 2 and have disappeared.  Today, often only black and white photographs of them remain, for example, this one, a picture of which appeared in a catalogue put together by the Polish authorities in 1950, listing works taken by the Germans.

Twilight (1991)

Summer Rain

He painted a number of nudes but they tended to be 'justified' by symbolic titles, such as these ones, Twilight and Summer Rain. The Rest, however, is one of his flimsier excuses for a nude, dates from 1895 but survived the war and is now in the National Museum of Warsaw.  I've been to Warsaw a number of times but, sadly, have never had the time to visit the museum.

Nude Study 

Gerson became a professor at the School of Fine Arts and was a noted critic and author. The Rest is an unusually sensuous nude among his output and he makes the slightly twisted body of his model glow against the muted, almost monochromatic background.