Before you leave...
Take 20% off your first order
20% off
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order
Discover summer reading lists for all ages & interests!
Find Your Next Read

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests' misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.
Author: Mary Roberts
ISBN-10: 0822339676
ISBN-13: 9780822339670
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2007
Pages: 248
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.23w x 0.60d
Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor in British Art at the University of Sydney. She is a coeditor of Orientalism's Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, also published by Duke University Press.
Thanks for subscribing!
This email has been registered!
Take 20% off your first order
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order