The Sultan's Favourite

"Fatima, the Sultan's favourite concubine of the seraglio waits for his attentions on the raised terrace that  overlooks the palace and surrounding oasis town. A hot wind blows off the desert in the sultry late afternoon offering little relief from the oppressive heat that has forced everybody else in the palace to seek shelter until later in the day. Naked apart from some jewellery she drinks mint tea on a fine Persian carpet from a small ewer after smoking some apple shisha in a narghile brought to her by one of the eunuchs. Her thoughts drift to the evening ahead, languid but forever trapped in the gilded cage of the Sultan's Harem......."
OK as you can see, I have decided to paint an Orientalist picture with nods to Gérome, Ernst and many other painters from the great era of Orientalist art in the late 19th century. I wanted to do a picture with the sun behind instead of contre-jour which so many of my paintings use as it's main lighting. I wanted rich bright colour using lots of reds, oranges and yellows for a hot almost oppressive atmosphere and thought it would be nice to paint an Orientalist fantasy. Fantasy this very much is of course and have made no attempt to veer away from the fevered imaginations of those previous, very European painters who never had any access to Ottoman harems and palaces and as such they indulged in very male fantasies of naked women lying around in opulent interiors at the beck and call of indolent Caliphs and Sultans which of course was a far cry from the reality of life in the seraglio. This proved to be a very fiddly picture to paint and is the nearest to what I used to do many years ago as an illustrator and as such is to me a one-off exercise which has been painted purely with a view to exhibiting it at Illuxcon in September. 39 1/4" x 15 3/4" oil on canvas. There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in preceding posts on this blog.