onrad Kiesel, Jean-LTon GTrome, EugFne Delacroix, John Singer Sargent, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and at the start of the twentieth century Henri Matisse (Croutier 16-197), the harem offered artists the chance to chip away at the sometimes stultifying veneer of western poses of respectability. In contrast to written observations of the Orient, these painters were far less inhibited in their presentations. The allure of the Odalisque could readily be slotted into the celebrated tradition of the nude, an artistic convention centuries old. Nineteenth century Western painters highlighted the sensuality of the harem, repeatedly rendering the Odalisques as bountifully curved and inviting. Whereas respectable citizens of the British Empire would conventionally feel obliged to censor the sensual pleasures revealed in the harem and feel almost overwhelmed by the sheer mass of flesh displayed at the "hamams", the luxurious Arabic baths (Croutier 48). Painters revelled in this non-restrictive gaze and presented these hedonistic sights without reserve. Writers and travel journalists of the nineteenth century were much less likely to yield to this sense of painterly abandonment. In their documentary-style accounts, British and American travellers repeatedly can be glimpsed stumbling to achieve the proper perspective.
Almost equally drawn in and repelled by this foreign style of living, Victorian authors and diary-keepers alike struggle with this odd rendering of the oriental tension displayed by women of the harem, stasis in the midst of flux, eroticism as foreplay for progeny, continuity foregrounded by diversity. For these viewers to tell was somehow to be called upon to judge. Here the imperialist tone of colonial prejudice is more highly visible in these writers than the painters who responded with a simpler response of near child-like delight rather than adult censorship. Freudian thought would observe ...