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.
No comments:
Post a Comment