Pleasure and Parody in the Harem: Elisabeth-Jerichau Baumann’s encounter with Princess Nazli Hanim

Written by Iris Bednarski

Edited by Courtney Squires & Flavie Deveaux

I would like to express my gratitude towards Dr. Özlem Dağoğlu - an enchanting scholar whose dedication to the lost women of Art History was of great inspiration to this project. With her support I hope to have rendered these ghostly objects living once more.

Figure 1. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, The Princess Nazli Hanum, 1875, oil on canvas, private collection.

With languid movements beneath the soft folds of a gauzy canopy, a woman reclines to rest. Dark tresses of hair part with velvet robes to reveal her exposed chest, milky white and garnished by a delicate string of pearls. She is surrounded by a wealth of treasures: a gilded coffee tray, a pet monkey, and fresh flowers brought to her by a doting servant girl. This reclined woman is an odalisque, an object of desire. She is the subject of the Danish-Polish painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann’s The Princess Nazli Hanum (1875) (Fig. 1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the painted Princess bears resemblance to her historical counterpart in appearance only (Fig. 2). Jerichau-Baumann’s painting is indeed pure fantasy, completed years after her initial encounter with the Princess in an elite Istanbul harem. It is also the only surviving work of her many portraits of Nazli, as those commissioned by the Princess’ family are now lost. Yet, to categorize this encounter in terms of a European artist establishing her contribution to the Orientalist canon would be too limiting. Jerichau-Baumann’s portrait is merely one pendant in a fascinating cross-cultural exchange between her and Nazli, both cosmopolitan women immersed in the international arts scene of the late nineteenth century. Their encounter was mutually inspirational yet ambivalent in outcome. For Jerichau-Baumann, the exchange motivated an imperialistic harem fantasy that, ironically, allowed her to disrupt certain Western conventions. For Nazli, the interaction helped to cultivate a personal interest in the fine arts that later manifested as a critique of the Orientalist project. The story of this painter and Princess reveals the currents of cross-cultural exchange and representational modality that permeate the Orientalist genre – the painterly exotic an especially volatile, dialogical construction.

Figure 2. P. Sébah, Princess Nazlı Hanım, n.d, carte de visite, private collection, Denmark. In Nazlı's photographic games, by Mary Roberts, Plate 1, Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5, 2014.

Jerichau-Baumann entered Prince Mustafa Fazil Pasha’s Istanbul harem in November of 1869. At fifteen years old, his daughter Nazli was the senior harem princess.¹ Although not the most powerful woman in her father’s household, she was already well-known for her soirées at which elite women, both local and foreign, were entertained.² Nazli was fluent in English and French, enjoyed music, and possessed a particular fondness for her pianola.³ She acquired these interests from her father, a proponent of Western-style reform whose political liberalism was matched by a social liberalism that he extended to his daughter.⁴ Thus it is not surprising that, upon Jerichau-Baumann’s request to paint the young Nazli, Prince Mustafa agreed. Jerichau-Baumann nevertheless endured extensive negotiations with the Prince and his wife, Dilazad, who opposed the artist’s venture. While Islamic culture already discouraged figural representation in art, female portraiture was even more unusual given that the law of the veil prohibited the public visibility of harem women.⁵

Eventually, Jerichau-Baumann was granted permission to paint the Princess. She was, however, required to execute her entire practice within the harem, including the laborious final processes of varnishing and framing.⁶ She produced three portraits from her sittings, all lost to history but detailed extensively in her personal journal. One showed Nazli in her typical dress, a fusion of French and Ottoman fashions, and was gifted to the Princess of Wales, a friend of Nazli’s. The second portrait which depicted Nazli, as Jerichau-Baumann described it, “in her true harem costume,” the artist was permitted to keep.⁷ The third and final portrait, with “her eyes looking upwards, like those of an angel,” was presented to Nazli herself.⁸ Upon the completion of these works, Jerichau-Baumann returned to Europe where she would soon display the “true harem” portrait of Nazli at a London exhibition, betraying the trust of the Princess and her family.⁹ This decision marks a poignant moment in the timeline of Nazli and Jerichau-Baumann’s relationship. As Mary Roberts writes: “Inside the harem in Istanbul, the permission to paint was the result of a collaboration with Nazli; in London, Nazli is reduced to an object of fascination for a Western audience.”¹⁰

The implications of this decision are apparent in Jerichau-Baumann’s fantasy portrait, The Princess Nazli Hanum. This painting was completed in 1875, following the artist’s return trip to Turkey, during which she did not visit with Nazli.¹¹ In a typically Orientalist manner, it depicts the semi-nude Princess donning a racy costume under swaths of starry blue fabric, her servant-girl crouched amidst a curtained background. The Princess Nazli Hanum stages a familiar Western fantasy in which Nazli is reduced to an object of desire. The question thus arises as to why the artist chose to depart so brashly from her earlier, rather faithful representational approach when painting the Princess a fourth time. Certainly, Jerichau-Baumann’s odalisque paintings were aimed to satisfy the demands of a European market. The artist was an ambitious professional with a shrewd business acumen that enabled her to navigate a male-dominated practice. Well aware of the commercial appeal of harem scenes, she traveled extensively to promote her practice to various major salons and royal European households engaged in the Orientalist project.¹²

Yet, Jerichau-Baumann’s change in approach cannot be categorized as simply market-driven. There is an abundance of documentation, from personal letters to travelogues, of Jerichau-Baumann’s own enjoyment of the harem fantasy – highly unusual for a female artist of her time. In a letter to her husband and children, she relishes her initial encounter with Nazli: “Yesterday I…fell in love with a beautiful Turkish princess.”¹³ This sentiment is reiterated in the artist’s travelogue, in which she describes Nazli rather sensuously. She writes of “her fine face, that was enclosed in waves of her well-kept hazelnut-blond hair which loosely fell down her shoulders and surrounded her velvety cheeks.”¹⁴ This sense of admiration is not lost in The Princess Nazli Hanum. However self-indulgent, there is an impassioned quality to the composition. The vibrant, dense colours and swift brush strokes diverge notably from the muted palette employed in the harem paintings of other female Orientalists, such as Henriette Browne. As Julia Kuehn writes, these specific techniques “declare the painter’s tempestuous self-involvement” in this portrait of the Princess.¹⁵ Here, Nazli’s image is perverted by the carnal gaze of an imperial artist-voyeur.

Ironically, Jerichau-Baumann’s painting baffled critics. To the nineteenth-century reviewer, the painting’s overt sensuality and brazen expression of desire were diametrically opposed to conventional conceptions of femininity. One reviewer for Art Journal explicitly remarked upon the “masculine quality” of Jerichau-Baumann’s work, ultimately deeming her female portrayals as unacceptable.¹⁶ This confusion signals a discreet nevertheless triumphant disruption on the artist’s part - Jerichau-Baumann’s harem fantasy challenging both Western standards of artistic and social practice. Through gendered provocations, The Princess Nazli Hanum communicates an overtly feminized eroticism that positions the artist – that is, the female artist – as a desiring subject.¹⁷ Such a manoeuvre enabled Jerichau-Baumann to redefine artistic convention while legitimizing the exploitative demands of the Orientalist project.

To conclude here would be to obscure the agency of Jerichau-Baumann’s Ottoman patron. Only a selection of scholarship on the artist’s harem portraits dedicates focus to Nazli, despite the influence the encounter had on the Princess’ own career. Nazli was already familiar with the European arts scene by the time of her introduction to Jerichau-Baumann. The Princess’ upbringing in an Islamic family engaged with Western cultural practices meant that she was exposed to an international milieu of painting, sculpture, and music at a young age – both her uncle and future husband prominent collectors of the twentieth century.¹⁸ Nazli’s meeting with Jerichau-Baumann, however, granted her intimate insight into the practice of a female artist. The Princess cherished the encounter, often sitting next to Jerichau-Baumann in the harem to watch her paint.¹⁹ Only a decade after their meeting, around the same time that Jerichau-Baumann produced The Princess Nazli Hanum, Nazli’s own art came to public prominence. In 1880, she exhibited four still-life paintings at the Artists of the Bosporus and Constantinople Club in a salon that incorporated the works of notable European and Ottoman artists.²⁰

Figure 3. Photographer unknown, Princess Nazlı Hanım, n.d, two photographs, Staffordshire Records Office. In Nazlı's photographic games, by Mary Roberts, Plate 6, Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5, 2014.

However, Nazli’s artistic practice was not limited to painting. During the 1880s, as by then the renowned hostess of her own distinguished salon in Cairo, Nazli produced a particularly remarkable pair of photographic self-portraits (Fig. 3). The Princess staged two distinct representations against a studio backdrop of palm trees and pyramids. One depicts a dignified Nazli seated upright, donning contemporary European fashion. The other, however, features Nazli dressed as an Ottoman gentleman, accompanied by a woman costumed as a vagrant pottery seller. This second portrait offers what is undeniably a playful pastiche of the Western harem fantasy.²¹ The implication of Nazli’s parody is twofold: the performative quality of the image reifies her agency within the scene while demystifying the very trope it parodies.

It is within this photographic output that a most salient connection to Jerichau-Baumann may be drawn. Most notably, as Roberts notes, there are striking parallels between Nazli’s portrait and Jerichau-Baumann’s earlier work, An Egyptian Pottery Seller Near Gizeh (1876-78) (Fig. 4).²² Like Nazli’s photograph, the painting also depicts a peasant woman in flowing robes. Each pottery seller adopts the same pose, seated relaxed with one knee propped up. While it is unknown whether Nazli was aware of this specific piece, it serves well as a point of contrast to Jerichau-Baumann’s harem paintings like The Princess Nazli Hanum. Nazli’s photograph is devoid of the possessive desire that permeates Jerichau-Baumann’s oeuvre. Here, the sensual is rendered satirical – farce and theatrics foregrounded over the sexual availability of the female subject.

Figure 4. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, An Egyptian Pottery Seller at Gizeh, 1876-78, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Denmark, København.

Most notably, Nazli’s photography introduces a cross-cultural dimension to her initial meeting with Jerichau-Baumann. The encounter was mutually inspirational, enabling both women to explore the modalities of Orientalist representation in order to challenge artistic convention. Situated alongside Jerichau-Baumann’s The Princess Nazli Hanum, Nazli’s work relocates the harem woman from a sumptuous fantasy to theatrical play, from the passive to the active sphere. Likewise, Nazli’s photographs transform Jerichau-Baumann’s paintings from imperial artefacts into dialogical objects that engage the women they encounter. These artworks are ephemeral images, with meanings that bend and shift as they move across different cultural contexts and social imaginaries.

The story of Jerichau-Baumann and Princess Nazli’s relationship is one of give and take. For Jerichau-Baumann, the exchange motivated the painting of a harem fantasy that allowed her to disrupt Western convention. For Nazli, the interaction helped to cultivate a personal interest in the fine arts that later manifested as a critique of the Orientalist project. Interestingly, Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli maintained a lifelong friendship, exchanging letters and photographs often.²³ Here is a fleeting instance within the art historical canon when cross-cultural encounter enabled exchange rather than simply betrayal. Here are two women whose artworks speak to each other, oscillating between the modalities of imperial reverie and playful parody, across London exhibitions and Cairo salons. It should be noted that this was an exchange mediated through commonality. As Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati argues, Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli shared certain experiences that encouraged such an unusual nineteenth-century artistic encounter.²⁴ These women were cosmopolitan polyglots; they were international creatives, daughters, and wives. The works they created reflect these commonalities, while revealing irreconcilable differences – the entanglements of cross-cultural exchange rife with mimicry, mockery, and contradiction.

Endnotes

1. Mary Roberts, “Harem Portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Egyptian Princess Nazli Hanim,” in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 77.

2. Mary Roberts, “Nazlı's photographic games: Said and art history in a contrapuntal mode,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5 (2014): 468.

3. Amédée Baillot de Guerville, “The Khedivial Family,” in New Egypt (London: W. Heinemann, 1906), 139. 

4. Mary Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” in Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), 129-30.

5. Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): 47.

6. Mary Adelaide Walker, “Sketches of Eastern Life and Scenery,” in Eastern Life and Scenery I (London: Chapman & Hall, 1886), 2.

7. Roberts, “Harem Portraiture,” 83.

8. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder (Kjøbenhavn: O.H. Delbanco et. al., 1881), 24. *Translation sourced from Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” 136.

9. Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” 51.

10. Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” 137.

11. Julia Kuehn, “Introduction: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, “Egypt 1870,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 1 (2010): 258.

12. Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” 138.

13. Letter from Constantinople to her husband Adolf and children, November 19, 1869. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann papers, Royal Library, Copenhagen. *Sourced from Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” 130.

14. Jerichau-Baumann, “Brogede Rejsebilleder,” 22.

15. Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” 53.

16. Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” 52.

17. Roberts, “Oriental Dreams,” 86-7.

18. Roberts, “Harem Portraiture,” 87.

19. Roberts, “Nazlı's photographic games,” 471.

20. Roberts, “Nazlı's photographic games,” 471.

21. Roberts, “Nazlı's photographic games,” 475.

22. Roberts, “Harem Portraiture,” 92.

23. Roberts, “Nazlı's photographic games,” 461.

24. Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, “The Painter and the Princess: Constructing Feminism/Decentring Orientalism between Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cairo and Tunis,” Cultural History 9, no. 1 (2020): 64.

Bibliography

De Guerville, Amédée Baillot. “The Khedivial Family.” In New Egypt, 135-143. London: W. Heinemann, 1906.

Jerichau-Baumann, Elisabeth. Brogede Rejsebilleder. København: O.H. Delbanco et. al., 1881.

Jerichau-Baumann, Elisabeth. “Letter from Constantinople to her husband Adolf and children, November 19, 1869.” Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann papers, Royal Library, Copenhagen.

Johnsrud Zorgati, Ragnhild. “The Painter and the Princess: Constructing Feminism/Decentring Orientalism between Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cairo and Tunis.” Cultural History 9, no. 1 (2020): 46-71. doi:10.3366/cult.2020.0208. 

Kuehn, Julia. “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): 31-63. https://doi.org/10.5250/fronjwomestud.32.2.0031.  

Kuehn, Julia. “Introduction: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, “Egypt 1870.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 1 (2010): 257-266. https://doi.org/10.1017/S106015030999043X.  

Roberts, Mary. “Harem Portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Egyptian Princess Nazli Hanim.” In Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, 77-98. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.

Roberts, Mary. “Nazlı's photographic games: Said and art history in a contrapuntal mode.” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5 (2014): 460-478. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2014.960659. 

Roberts, Mary. “Oriental Dreams.” In Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, 128-149. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007.

Walker, Mary Adelaide. “Sketches of Eastern Life and Scenery.” In Eastern Life and Scenery I, 1-41. London: Chapman & Hall, 1886.