Gendering the Empire: Women’s Orientalist Paintings

Julia Kuehn

Women’s Orientalist paintings of the nineteenth century have received comparatively little attention by, specifically, Victorian literary scholars. The reasons might be found in the difficulties involved in tracking down both painters and paintings, but also in feelings of shyness related to ‘invading’ a research area that traditionally ‘belongs to’ art historians. Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts have done a vast amount of historical and archival groundwork but they have also suggested critical ways in which cultural studies and literature scholars may approach these paintings through paradigms of, among others, Orientalism, the ‘female gaze’, or desire.

The ‘texts’ and ‘narratives’ of women’s Orientalist paintings have the ability to tell us about Victorian women’s contributions to and disapproval of the European colonial project, invoking discourses of race, class, alterity, and ‘the woman question’. As such, they are ‘propaganda’ in many ways, public works of art and political statements about central issues in colonial and pre-feminist Victorian Britain, and they therefore deserve our attention.

This paper builds on Lewis’ and Roberts’ work and discusses a number of harem paintings by Henriette Browne, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, and Margaret Cookesley. Rather than Orientalism, it uses the, arguably, more flexible critical paradigm of exoticism, and suggests that artists and paintings constantly oscillate between the two loyalties of ethnographic fact on the one hand and audience-motivated fantasy on the other.