In
July of 1798 Napoleon marched into Egypt with an army. He
defeated the Turks at the battle of the Pyramids, stayed
for a few weeks and then was driven out by the British.
In the small amount of time that he was there he managed
to change everything.
Following
him came first a trickle and then a torrent of Westerners
into the Near and Middle East. The artists and writers who
were inspired by what they saw became known as the Orientalists.
They travelled through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon,
Palestine, Arabia and North Africa. With time they have
changed the Western perception of the East and influenced
generations of artists.
In
the Western and Oriental imagination, water pipes appear
as artistic artefacts. The Orientalist painters definitely
had a taste for representing the Narghile. Here is a selection
of works with Hookahs featured in them.
Rudolf
Ottenfeld, Backgammon 1890
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Bashi-Bazouks
singing , Jean-Leon Gerome, 1868
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Women
of Algiers in their Room, Eugene Delacroix, 1834
Eugène Delacroix's painting Women in Algiers, makes
use of rich and deep colours, fixed women sitting around
a narghile.
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La
Servante De Harem, Paul-Désiré Trouillebert
1874
The
harem handmaid ( 1874 ), in this painting, the "beautiful
and cold topless slave" holds a tray supporting a small
narghile. The long hose coils up around the mast in five
to six loops.
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Odalisque
and Slave, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres 1839
Jean-Auguste
Dominique Ingres creates an indolent atmosphere, an almost
undressed woman, lies on a bed. In the foreground, to the
right, discreetly stands a tiny narghile.
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Ange
Tissier, Une Algérienne
An
Algerian woman and her slave (1860) features a woman, elegantly
dressed in the old Turkish tradition, nonchalantly holding
the hose of a narghile. She sits near a wooden table inlaid
with mother-of-pearl and ebony.
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Bashi-Bazouk
Chieftain, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1881
Finally,
the artist who most represented narghile, is Jean-Léon
Gérôme. The Bashi-Bazouk featured above was
a chieftain of mercenary troops of the Ottoman Empire. The
pleated skirt and light skin shows that this chieftain is
of Balkan origin. These skirts are still worn today as ceremonial
dress in the Greek military. Gerome's painting was so accurate
in recording detail that scholars used them as ethnological
records.
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Allumeuse
de Narghilé by Jean-Léon Gérome
Another
painting that deserves a mention is A Woman lighting a Narghile.
A commentator noticed that there is a striking contrast
between the nudity of the woman who carefully lights the
narghile by the pool and others basking on the side of the
pond, and a group of veiled women watching the scene, in
the background, behind a hand-rail.
›Nargile:
A Puff on History
›Puffin
at the old hubble-bubble
›Inhale
the Pleasure of an Unhurried Ottoman Past
›Massell
(Molasses)
