In the wake of Bonaparte's Egyptian Campaign, artists of the nineteenth century became fascinated by the Orient and, most particularly, the harems which were so remote from western culture. These places rapidly provided a pretext for drawing the languid bodies of naked women, whose depiction in any other context would have been intolerable. This assembly of numerous works by Orientalist painters constitutes a sublime testimony to an imagined fantasy Orient, located between eroticism and sensuality.
