Nude female slave with tambourin

Painted in 1880 and held at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, this canvas by Swiss artist Frank Buchser reflects his extensive travel and direct engagement with non-European subjects throughout his career. Buchser was among the most widely travelled Swiss painters of the nineteenth century, spending time in North Africa, the United States during the Civil War period, and the Balkans, bringing back observational material that distinguished his work sharply from the stay-at-home village genre of contemporaries like Anker. A nude female figure identified as a slave with tambourine suggests an Orientalist context — the North African or Middle Eastern subjects that occupied European artists following the expansion of colonial access and the popularity of Delacroix's and Gérome's imagery. Buchser's treatment of such subjects carried the tensions inherent in Orientalist painting broadly: the exoticising European gaze directed at subjugated or marginalised people. The Kunstmuseum Solothurn's holding of this work situates it within the Swiss national collection as a document of Buchser's cosmopolitan range and the European imaging of the 'other' in the late nineteenth century.

The nude figure with tambourine required Buchser to command both academic figure painting — precise anatomy, controlled modelling of skin in different light conditions — and the exoticising visual codes of Orientalist genre: warm saturated colour, loose drapery, suggestive accessories. His extended travel provided direct observation of North African contexts, though the studio composition inevitably mediated what he had seen.