• wjrii@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.”