Scandal in the harem

Sophie Anderson was born in Paris but spent much of her early life in America, where she met and married her husband, the English artist Walter Anderson. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy between 1855 and 1896. The artist couple moved to Capri in 1871 in the hope that the warmer climate would improve their health. In 1871 she also became one of the first living female artists to have her art work purchased by a British public museum. Inspired by the vivid colours of the country around her Sophie painted many exquisite works, such as this, featuring local models. Sophie lived in Capri until 1894.

Kate Nichols explores the nature of Anderson’s Orientalist paintings which ‘focus on close ups of female figures’ (K. Nichols, In Depth: Sophie Anderson, a cosmopolitan Victorian Artist in the Midlands in ‘Midlands Art Papers’, Birmingham, 2018). The unifying quality in her subject matter was that she never included adult men, instead she preferred painting images of women and children (ibid., p. 5). Nichols observes that Anderson’s Scheherazade (New Art Gallery, Walsall), which ‘tackles the theme of women’s creative capacity emerging despite – or indeed because of and in response to – male power’, stands alongside Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s approach to his female subjects by offering ‘engagement with earlier female artists’ renderings of single historical and literary female figures’.

When discussing another work, Nichols notes “like the figures in Scandal in the Harem, these women are exotic studies in their own right. They do not require the obsessive architectural detail associated with Orientalist painting (Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Snake Charmer of 1879 is perhaps the most famous example).”