In the case of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Orientalist

paintings, consider why these works are deemed

morally problematic and if one’s moral convictions can
affect their aesthetic value.

Beauty, Goodness and Truth: Topics in the Philosophy

of Art (29037)

Student ID: 1511496

Word Count: 3988
In the case of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Orientalist paintings, consider why these works are
deemed morally problematic and if one’s moral convictions can affect their aesthetic value.

Over the last four decades, philosophical debate has become increasingly concerned with the

issue of morality in art and art criticism1. On one side of the debate stands Moralism and on

the other, Autonomism and its focus is rooted in the question of whether art can be seen as

aesthetically independent from or intimately connected to moral commitments and other

values. Moralism maintains the notion that art and morality are inextricably linked. Most

famously, Philosopher David Hume holds that moral defects in an art work are aesthetic

defects and therefore a work of art’s aesthetic value can be significantly affected if it has

moral flaw.2 While the debate on art and morality is in fairly recent resurgence in Philosophy,

ideas on the matter hark back to Plato, who argued that the good and beautiful are necessarily

connected and therefore if a work of art is morally ‘bad’, then that work of art is, as a result,

wholly ‘bad’ and there can be no such thing therefore, as a great bad work of art.3 The other

side of the debate ranges from Formalism, notoriously committed to by Clive Bell who insists

claims ‘art for art’s sake’ and artistic autonomy, to Noel Carroll’s ‘moderate moralism.’4 The

narrative arts, predominantly literature and film are used in support of these theories,

however this discussion will focus around the Orientalist tradition as an interesting case study

for the debate on art and morality. Having received extensive attention from its reception to

more recent scrutiny in light of Edward Said’s Orientalism in the 1970s, Orientalist art,

especially paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, have provoked varied responses as they are

unquestionably aesthetically excellent yet criticised by many as morally problematic. Upon

study of these paintings, questions consistent with the moralism debate on art are

1
Noel Carroll, ‘Moderate Moralism’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 36:3, 1996, p225
2
Daniel Jacobson, ‘In Praise of Immoral Art’, Philosophical Topics, 25:1, 1997, p156
3
Kendall L. Walton and Michael Tanner, ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality’, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 68, 1994, p 64
4
Walton p64, Carroll 226
immediately raised; Can a work of art be immoral or morally corrupt an audience? If so can

audiences suspend moral beliefs in order to make aesthetic value judgments on a work of art?

These as well as other questions will be answered throughout the course of this essay which

is structured in two parts; the first aims to identify precisely what has been claimed as

‘immoral’ in Gérôme’s works through investigation of responses from his contemporary

audience to recent feminist critiques, paying particular attention to his paintings depicting the

female nude. The second part of the essay deals with the wider philosophical debate on moral

judgment, engaging primarily in the writings of Berys Gaut, Noel Caroll, and Daniel

Jacobson, ultimately arguing that while a work of art may possess certain moral flaws, they

cannot impede on aesthetic value.

The Orientalist tradition, a popular genre of Academic art in late nineteenth-century

Europe, particularly in France, concerned the painterly representations of North Africa and

the Middle East. The subject had lasting popularity, with artists continuing to use the oriental

as inspiration into the twentieth century, which John Mackenzie in his book Orientalism:

History, Theory and the Arts, attributes in part to European artists seeking something new and

exciting for their work, which was offered in the new sights of the Near Islamic East which

had the visual stimulation and subjects of fascination for artists as well as a relative proximity

for tourist potential.5 Rhana Kabani, in her critique of Orientalism admits that the consumer

era of the nineteenth century, ‘craved for variety and multiplicity in representation’ meaning

that the Eastern world provided the necessary inspiration for what followed in unquestionably

beautiful paintings full of colour and vibrancy, satisfying the appeal of the exotic East for the

Western viewer.6

5
John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, (Manchester, 1995) p52
6
Rana Kabbani, Imperial fictions: Europe’s myths of the Orient, (London, 2008) p117
 Then why are these works deemed morally problematic? Let’s firstly look at the

responses to the art works around the time of their initial reception. In the 1870s, majority

ruled and the works received high praise especially from Théophile Gautier, art and literary

critic and ardent defender of Gérôme. He wrote on the artist; ‘his masterly studies as a painter

of history, his talent as a draughtsman- refined, elegant, exact and yet full of style- his

personal talent for ethnographic perception… all of this qualified him, better than any other

artist, to represent this simple interest which modern explorers of the Orient have till now

neglected.’7 However, his works also received negative attention from critics in France and

Britain due to the portrayal of morally questionable subject matter; the paintings startled by

using taboo subjects of the forbidden Harem and the controversial slave trade.8 He used the

image of the foriegn woman in works such as The Dance of the Almeh (The Belly Dancer),

1863, (fig. 1) as a theme for erotic fantasy which the British saw as typically French in

indecency.9 Yet given all this, the artist remained a popular favourite with the bourgeois

public and regularly featured in the salon with The Belly Dancer receiving incredible success

in the Salon of 1864.

More recently, since Said’s book Orientalism, the orientalist tradition in art has been

under far heavier scrutiny, with light being shed on other morally questionable aspects of the

paintings. Subject matter for one, which was initially accepted by many as ethnographic

account of Eastern life, is now considered not merely crude or lacking in taste but also

hypocritical. The implicit imperialistic attack on the Islamic East and their customs means

that the success of the paintings rely partly on the assumption that the Western viewer will

automatically assume a superior position over the East by considering himself of higher

7
Gerald M. Ackerman, The life and work of Jean-Léon Gérôme: with a catalogue raisonné, (London,
1986) p45
8
Rheina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, (Oxfordshire, 2013)
p75
9
Ibid.
moral standing.10 Additionally, this Western construction of the East and Eastern peoples,

portrayed in literature and painting as being lazy, lustful, cruel, decadent and condemnable

for their inferiority to the moral West is now widely accepted as simply that: a construction.

We know that certain themes prevalent in paintings were a part of life in the East and

domestic slavery was in fact hard to ignore, however the problem here lies in the unlikelihood

that Gérôme and other artists would have seen such dealings.11

Gérôme’s artistic style, credited by Gautier as faithful to draughtsmanship, has

equally been critiqued as academic and outdated which further damages his representations.

He travelled for some time with photographer Frederic-August Bartholdi and used his

photographs of scenery and architecture as devices for perspective and background studies of

his paintings. Paired with illusionistic realism, viewers were easily manipulated into the

impression that a painting of such acute detail and exactness must have been based on real

life observation.12 The obvious moral danger here is that viewing his works depicting` a

controversial subject leads an audience to assume they were painted from life and are led to

believe false immoralities about the East. Another interesting comment on Gérôme’s style is

how it was changing around the 1860s, the peak time of his orientalist career, from a strong

reputation within the neo-grec school towards a more contemporary realism which, as Gerald

Ackerman states, was a development that came later than it possibly should have due to the

taste and demands of commissions.13 A criticism here would be on Gérôme’s pandering to

the popular taste of mass culture, with anxiety about remaining en vogue while trying to

10
Lewis p115
11
Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Rélaux, Edouard Papet, The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon
Gérôme (1824-1904), exhibition catalogue, (Paris, 2010) p260
12
Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Linda Nochlin (ed.), The Politics of Vision: Essays on
Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, (New York, 1989), p47
13
Ackerman p58
prove his artistic-ness.14 Jules-Antoine Castagnary for one wrote negatively on Gérôme, who

he suggested produced paintings which were ‘calculated’ purely to sell.15

The 1970s also saw the rise of Feminist art historical critique and with it came a

developed awareness of the problematics surrounding depictions of the female nude. Anne

Eaton, in her essay ‘What’s wrong with the (female) nude? A feminist perspective on Art and

Pornography’, discusses the eroticisation and aestheticisation of female subordination in

representations of the female nude which she says ‘makes male dominance and female

subordination sexy’.16 She explains the immorality within European artistic tradition of

objectifying women through painting the nude in erotic, sensual or violent context. Eaton

defines the term ‘objectification’ as meaning, among various other things, to treat a person as

a mere thing or object.17 She goes on to make a list showing exactly how artworks visually

objectify the female nude or nudes they depict, relating specifically to different artists’ and

their works. One object on her list refers to the ‘generic body’ which is the artist’s use of a

type of female body lacking in personal identity and posed in a way that she becomes

sexually available for the viewer as merely a body.18 Gérôme’s painting The Great Bath at

Bursa, 1885 (fig. 2) can be seen as a strong example of this as the female nudes in the

painting are all pale, idealised, have postures similar to one another and to their ‘type’ in his

wider milieu which make them overall generic. It can be said that every pale female nude in

the image, excluding the redhead with her back to the viewer in the foreground, are strikingly

similar facially and in bodily form. This, according to the definitions set by Eaton and also

Martha Nussbaum, is an image objectifying the females depicted, and can be further argued

14
Nochlin p49
15
Laurence des Cars et al. p267
16
Anne W. Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and
Pornography’, Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Art and Pornography: Philosophical essays,
(Oxford, 2012), p280
17
Eaton p286
18
Eaton p287
that this is morally problematic because it aestheticises objectification. This painting, as true

of the rest of his oeuvre, is aesthetically beautiful, which Eaton may argue strengthens the

notion of female inferiority because belonging to a realm of high art, it acquires a level of

immunity from moral blame.19 Unlike an image of a single female nude, the inclusion of

multiple women has been critiqued as the smuggling in of extraneous nudity to one scene

which can be counted as another moral failing for Gérôme and as stressed above, by using

precise detail and academic polish, it appears that the scene must have been true to life, when

actually it is almost entirely a fabrication.20 Instead of an ethnographic study of a Turkish

bath, this painting becomes a mere fulfilment of erotic fantasies in the French imagination

and of an assumed, majorly male heterosexual western viewer. Critics like Eaton would then

argue that this work would suffer aesthetically because of the immorality in (implicitly)

making sex inequality beautiful.21

In another article by Eaton ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics meet: Titian’s rape of

Europa’, she morally condemns the 1560-62 work by Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), The Rape of

Europa, claiming that although it is widely considered as one of the best Renaissance

paintings, it is aesthetically defective because it eroticises and celebrates rape.22 I find this

essay problematic, firstly due to certain contradictions in her argument. In one breath, she

claims that there is clear non-consensual violence in the painting against Europa who is

‘clearly being savagely dragged off against her will,’ yet in the second breath she says she is

taking pleasure and is complicit to the rape that is about to take place.23 She blames her

contradictory reading on Titian’s both affirming and denying the force of rape within the

19
Eaton p307
20
Laurence des Cars et al. p263
21
Eaton p308
22
Anne W. Eaton, ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics meet: Titian’s rape of Europa’, Hypatia, 18:4, 2003,
p159
23
Eaton p162
painting. She calls the work unethical in the way that it arouses an erotic response to the act

of rape and concludes that this significantly damages its aesthetic merit. Another

contradiction to her argument appears when she later says that ‘an art work doesn’t become

deficient because of external reason’.24 I disagree with Eaton’s claim that Titian’s painting

explicitly calls for an arousing response to the immoral act of rape and I also disagree that

this diminishes the work aesthetically. Her argument is inconsistent and sometimes tenuous;

however, I raise this point as it invites the study of works that do explicitly condemn

unethical and immoral acts while simultaneously arousing the viewer, more so than in The

Rape of Europa.

I have in mind here Gérôme’s paintings of slave markets, a theme he indulged in

throughout his Orientalist career. In The Slave Market, 1866, (fig. 4), we see the transaction

presenting a domestic slave to be bought, completely nude with her garments in the hand of

the slave trader. The potential buyer has his hand in her mouth to inspect her teeth for good

health, while the other women sit in the background waiting to be examined. The scene is

gloomy and clearly gives the impression of a negative view of the slave trade in the East and

there is no question that the scene encourages moral as well as aesthetic judgement.

Mackenzie states that here, an audience takes this as the artist making a moral statement

about the East or offering this at least as one possible reading of the work.25 However, while

the slave trade was rife at this time, open air slave markets probably didn’t exist and if they

did Gérôme would not have had access to one so his various depictions on the subject are

constructs of his imagination.26 Like his bath compositions, they have been more recently

analysed as images encapsulating Western fantasy of the East and what Said has described as

24
Eaton p163
25
Mackenzie p64
26
Laurence des Cars et al. Discussion on Victor Schoelcher’s writings on his travels in Cairo. Open-
air slave markets have no mention in his report and knowing his political opinions he would have
mentioned them.
an invention that more accurately describes its inventor, the West.27 The bodies of captive

beauty are voluptuous and even though prisoners, often look sensual, like in his other

painting The Slave Market, 1871 (fig. 5). The nude in the foreground, while less like the pale

and pristine nudes occupying his other works, is sensually draped against the wall, eliciting

erotic voyeurism of her body. While the subject matter of the slave market is immoral, the

true moral danger lies in the aesthetically sensual treatment of the nude and the responses it

prescribes. The classical nude familiar to the nineteenth-century audience is used here in a

new exotic setting, adequately dissimilar to the nudes they were used to seeing in a

mythological guise, but with enough similarity to the ideal form which viewers would

recognise and enjoy. The exotic appeal panders to the voyeuristic instincts of a western

audience, who take up the equally condemnable position of the male onlookers in the

painting as well as that of Gérôme who has been criticised for his hypocritical voyeurism.28

While the setting of the Orient initially seems to depart from the tradition of disguising the

nude in mythology, and was in the nineteenth century seen as radical or even indecent, there

are clear resemblances to the classical nude in Gérôme’s works. To reiterate what was earlier

discussed, all of Gérôme’s nudes are highly idealised and constitute a ‘type’ which in style is

undeniably classical. In most paintings discussed this far, the female bodies in focus are

white, sleek and hairless and are posed in contrapposto, echoing marble sculpture and also

often using the motif of one or both arms raised above their heads, which in the Renaissance

alluded to sexual availability but here, as well as in Gerome’s Roman slave market paintings,

the arms usually cover their eyes suggesting innocence.29 The paleness is said to have been

another device used by Gérôme and others to make the female more identifiable for the

European audience so we pity rather than sexualise her, however the images are irrefutably

27
Kabbani p138
28
Laurence des Cars et al. p267
29
Nochlin p44
sensual both in themselves and in the responses they generate.30 Covering of their facial

features further creates a lack of personal identity, another feature contributing to Eaton’s

definition of objectification.

Even with this information however, can it fairly be said that Gérôme and his works

are sexually objectifying women? In terms of the ‘right’ mode of depiction of the female

nude, artists in the nineteenth century and prior to this faced notorious difficulty. Leon Batista

Alberti theoretically set out ideals of female beauty in della pittura under his method of ideal

imitation, which states quite simply that the success of paintings rest on their beauty and their

successful imitation of nature, however the representation of human form was challenging.31

For Alberti, artists should take inspiration not from one woman but from various elements of

different women and harmoniously combine these elements to produce the perfectly beautiful

female form. She would then be both true to nature but more perfect than any living women;

both generic and ideal.32 Gérôme’s nudes, as I have shown, follow faithfulness to antique

forms of depiction and are highly generic and idealised which clearly pay debt to his

academic training. The artist, as it has been made clear, was unlikely to have seen many of

the scenes he depicted, and therefore may never have seen the nude of a Muslim woman, so

he is uses the methods which he has been taught to paint the female nude. It is probable that

he used European models for most works, however interestingly, he commissioned a

photograph from French photographer Nadar for Sanding Female Nude, 1860-61, (fig. 6), to

be used as the model for Phryne Revealed Before the Areopagus, 1861, (fig. 7), in order to

maintain the familiar antique pose which he used for the majority of his nude studies.33 As

well as creating the illusion of a realistic antiquity in Roman slave market scenes, he used

30
Lewis p172
31
Eaton p298
32
Ibid
33
Laurence des Cars et al. p108
photographs to capture a highly detailed account of the East, including accuracy of detail in

décor, textiles, architecture and costume and even more so than on faces of the women which

could be further reason for many of his nudes seeming out of place, but the intention to create

accuracy or at least beauty as he knew it, in the form of the female and in creating the orient,

is clear. The pictorial devices and manner used to depict the nude have been heavily

criticised, however he was unconsciously repeating a problematic set of values that came

before Orientalist tradition and without entering into the question of intention, it nonetheless

seems overreaching to deem Gérôme and his works immoral due to elements which were

often unintentional.

What is significant here are the responses to these artworks where, more recently,

morality has been at the forefront of their value judgments. Moving on to the second part of

this discussion, I wish to engage with theory surrounding the philosophical debate on moral

and aesthetic judgment to explore what would be the appropriate method of judging

Gérôme’s works. Having thus far looked at what has been considered immoral in his works;

vulgarity of subject and taste in the late nineteenth century; as hypocritical constructs of the

East in more recent critique; and prominently his questionable style in painting the nude,

strengthening the message of gender inequality and manipulating the viewer into a

questionable moral view. I now want to argue that in spite of these potential moral failings,

the works of Gérôme and the Orientalists can still create a positive aesthetic response.

Firstly in the case of moralism, there is the argument on whether a painting’s ethical

defect can justifiably weaken its widely esteemed value which goes back to Hume, who

thought that, ‘an immoral work of art is one that expresses a pernicious ethical perspective,

which condones or winks at vice-especially by calling for emotional responses to its

characters and events which it would be wrong to provide.’34 For Hume, as moral and

aesthetic defects are essentially one and the same, art can be disfigured by immorality.

Similarly, Berys Gaut, in his essay ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art’ claims that if work is

ethically problematic, it is ‘…aesthetically bad insofar as it trivialises the issues with which it

deals and manifests ethically reprehensible attitudes.’35 As I have outlined above, Gérôme’s

questionable treatment of the oriental nude can potentially entice an audience into a

questionable moral view toward women and the Orient, but does this diminish the work

aesthetically? Some would say no. However, similarly, as much as it is attractive, I will also

argue against the notion of total artistic autonomy.

In part, the Kantian notion that, in its purest sense, beauty is not morality, is

agreeable. Reacting against Hume, in ‘The Critique of Judgment’, Kant explains how we

approach objects with disinterested attention and that aesthetic judgment is always

subjective.36 Aesthetic appreciation of art and beauty in this sense is not interested in a

viewer’s own individual desires or questions of morality and one cannot bring anything

personal to judgment on a work of art; It is merely contemplative. This notion inspired

formalists like Clive bell to claim that art is intrinsically valuable and serves no ulterior

purpose therefore judgment should be toward what is intrinsic to the art work as only this

counts as within aesthetic taste and judgment.37

The main praise of Gérôme has always been his formal style; his craftsmanship and

technical skill in handling light patterns, textures and beautiful human form which the

autonomist would argue as all that counts for an aesthetic evaluation. However, for a

34
Jacobson quoting David Hume p167
35
Berys Gaut, ‘The ethical criticism of art’, Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and ethics: Essays at
the intersection, (Cambridge, 1998, 7), p183
36
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer (ed.), trans. Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews (Cambridge, 2000), pp93-95
37
Kant pp89-93, Carroll p224
sensitive audience aware of the ethical pitfalls associated with his works, morality comes into

play with their responses. The notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ however is a notion of extreme

formalism which many find problematic. Noel Carroll rightly states how there are other

dimensions; cognitive, political and moral, through which people judge art and are often

called for.38 Understanding that there are moral consequences of artworks, he argues for

‘moderate moralism’, essentially agreeing with the Humean notion that moral defects or

strengths can sometimes make a work of art better or worse.39 In doing this he disregards the

notion of ‘moderate autonomism’ which can be argued as more appropriate when evaluating

the paintings of Gérôme. Moderate autonomism, as defined by Carroll, ‘allows that moral

discussion and evaluation of art works is appropriate, but remains committed to the view that

aesthetic dimension of the art work is autonomous from other dimensions.’40 We are moral

beings so cannot ignore our moral convictions but we have the ability to separate our moral

and aesthetic dimensions of value.

Finally, it must be said that most moral critique surrounding these artworks arose

from new concepts of Orientalism and morality which were products of the 1970s. There is

the notorious example of ‘Triumph of the will,’ a film which now is condemned for its

immorality as Nazi propaganda which now has its aesthetic merit questioned, not by

formalism but by moralism.41 Only with time and gaining knowledge about the complex

moral consequences of a work, do audiences view works of art differently. The autonomist

idea that that a work of art is not changed by extrinsic forces therefore supports the notion

that art cannot change over time; all that changes is the viewer’s response. Daniel Jacobson

convincingly adds to this by claiming that art is ‘just painterly devices of portrayal;’ people

38
Carroll p231
39
Carroll p232
40
Carroll p232
41
Jacobson p192
bring moral commitments to a work of art and contrariwise the work cannot be ascribed with

the agency of morally corrupting an audience. Jacobson, in his essay ‘In Praise of Immoral

Art’ discusses ‘minimal aesthetic disinterestedness’ which is the view that ‘in order to assess

a work’s aesthetic value, one must ignore the actual consequences of its reception.’42

In conclusion, reactions to Gérôme’s work and that of the Orientalists have always

been diverse. Extreme popularity was faced with minor cases of repugnance amongst the

nineteenth century audience however inspiration of oriental themes such as the odalisque

lasted into the twentieth century and in spite of the moral consequences for an audience, this

doesn’t necessarily mean, as Eaton suggests, that there has been an internalisation of the male

gaze and masculine erotic taste.43 Also, while further critique came in the 1970s, exhibitions

in 1992 in Preston, Hull and Oldham indicate a revival of interest in the genre, and

commercial art dealers continue to find value for Orientalist works.44 They are still valued

aesthetically. On the question of art and morality, it is true that moral judgments on a work of

art are never fully escapable, but these judgments needn’t and shouldn’t interfere with

aesthetic evaluation, and moderate autonomism proves that the two dimensions of aesthetic

and moral judgment can remain distinct. The works, admitted by Linda Nochlin, are valuable

to study as they raise wider philosophical questions.45 Objectification has been briefly

covered in this essay however there is potential for wider debate on question of art and

pornography with these works on the female nude, and further investigation can be made to

follow on from Jacobson’s notion that Immoral art can be praised; aesthetic flaws are

artistically valuable and essential to aesthetic value.46

42
Jacobson p165
43
Eaton p283, p287
44
Mackenzie p45
45
Nochlin p51
46
Daniel Jacobson, Ethical Perspective: On Narrative Art and Moral Perception, PhD Dissertation,
9500951, University of Michigan, 1994, p110
Bibliography

Anne W. Eaton, ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics meet: Titian’s rape of Europa’, Hypatia, 18:4, 2003,
159-188

Anne W. Eaton, ‘What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and
Pornography’, Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Art and Pornography: Philosophical essays,
(Oxford, 2012), 277- 309

Berys Gaut, ‘The ethical criticism of art’, Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and ethics: Essays at the
intersection, (Cambridge, 1998, 7), 182-203

Daniel Jacobson, ‘In Praise of Immoral Art’, (Peer Reviewed Journal), Philosophical Topics, 25:1,
1997, 155-192

Daniel Jacobson, Ethical Perspective: On Narrative Art and Moral Perception, PhD Dissertation,
9500951, University of Michigan, 1994, 142 pages

Desmond Hosford and Chong J. Wojkowski, French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined
Other, (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010)

Edward Said, Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient, (London, 1978)

Eileen John, ‘Artistic Value and Opportunistic moralism’, Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary
Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, (Oxford, 2006), 322-341

Gerald M. Ackerman, The life and work of Jean-Léon Gérôme: with a catalogue raisonné, (London,
1986)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer (ed.), trans. Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews (Cambridge, 2000), 89–127.

John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, (Manchester, 1995)

Kendall L. Walton and Michael Tanner, ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality’, (Peer reviewed
Journal), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 68, 1994, 27-66

Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Rélaux, Edouard Papet, The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon
Gérôme (1824-1904), exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum and Paris, Musée
d'Orsay, (Paris, 2010)

Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Linda Nochlin (ed.), The Politics of Vision: Essays on
Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, (New York, 1989), 33-57

Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, (Oxfordshire, 1992)

Matthew Kieran, ‘Art and morality’, Jerrold Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics,
(Oxford, 2005), 450-468

Noel Carroll, ‘Moderate Moralism’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 36:3, 1996, 223-263

Rana Kabbani, Imperial fictions: Europe’s myths of the Orient, (London, 2008)

Rheina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, (Oxfordshire, 2013)
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Illustrations

Figure 1. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Dance of The Almeh (The Belly Dancer), 1863, oil on
panel, 19 3/4 x 32 in., The Dayton Art Institute, Ohio

Figure 2. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Great Bath at Bursa, 1885, oil on canvas, 27.6 x 39.6 in.,
Private Collection
Figure 3. Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1560-1562, oil on canvas, 70.1 × 80.7 in., Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Figure 4. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866, oil on canvas, 33.3 in × 24.9 in., Clark
Art Institute, Massachusetts
Figure 5. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1871, oil on canvas, 29.5 × 23.5 in.,
Cincinnati Art Museum
Figure 6. Nadar (Felix Tournachon), Standing Female Nude, 1860-61, salted paper print from
glass negative, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 7. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryne revealed before the Areopagus, 1861, oil on canvas,
31.5 × 50.4 in, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany