3-098-885 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Slave Girl, c1886. Condemned for stealing the jewels that hang in front of her, as is made clear by the sign over her head ("a thief 's death" in Arabic), the iconography of the picture responds more to an erotic fantasy of the 19th-century imagination than to a realist narrative of slavery. Fabrés, one of the leading Spanish orientalists, was influenced by Fortuny, but endowed his work with a dimension of sensualist realism.