You’re gonna get downvotes, but based on going down a wikipedia rabbit hole and branching out from there a bit, it looks like you’re not entirely off base. It’s Femme Au Narguile (“Woman with Hookah”) from 1878 by Fernand Cormon. Especially early on, he was known for sensationalism in his state-sponsored works, including many bloody battles. After, he seems to have gone deep into “French Orientalism” which, 60+ years on from Napoleon, was gaining a reputation for being kind of emptily erotic. He did a lot of paintings of titillating ladies, often topless, some of them just straight-up harem scenes. Femme Au Narguile seems to exist mostly as a print for artsy stoners to buy, LOL.
Cormon was fairly well known in his day, but his work never made a huge impact on its own, and it looks like his legacy is more as a teacher than anything else. Whatever source Wiki pulled from was fuckin’ brutal about his death as an old man: “[H]e was almost forgotten by 1924 when he was run over by a taxi outside his studio, and is barely remembered today save as the teacher of pupils more illustrious than himself.”
This was probably the porn of that era.
You’re gonna get downvotes, but based on going down a wikipedia rabbit hole and branching out from there a bit, it looks like you’re not entirely off base. It’s Femme Au Narguile (“Woman with Hookah”) from 1878 by Fernand Cormon. Especially early on, he was known for sensationalism in his state-sponsored works, including many bloody battles. After, he seems to have gone deep into “French Orientalism” which, 60+ years on from Napoleon, was gaining a reputation for being kind of emptily erotic. He did a lot of paintings of titillating ladies, often topless, some of them just straight-up harem scenes. Femme Au Narguile seems to exist mostly as a print for artsy stoners to buy, LOL.
Cormon was fairly well known in his day, but his work never made a huge impact on its own, and it looks like his legacy is more as a teacher than anything else. Whatever source Wiki pulled from was fuckin’ brutal about his death as an old man: “[H]e was almost forgotten by 1924 when he was run over by a taxi outside his studio, and is barely remembered today save as the teacher of pupils more illustrious than himself.”
You probably had to be quite determined to get run over by a taxi in 1924.