Jeune fille arabe - Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux is celebrated primarily as a sculptor — creator of La Danse for the Paris Opéra façade and The Four Parts of the World — but he was also a skilled painter who produced portraits and figure studies throughout his career. Jeune fille arabe was painted in 1861 during Carpeaux's time in Rome as a Prix de Rome laureate at the Villa Medici, and reflects the broad North African and Near Eastern interest that pervaded French academic art following the Algerian conquest of 1830. Carpeaux encountered Arab and North African subjects through other artists' works and through the general Orientalist current rather than through direct experience of North Africa, and his treatment is more sympathetic and individualised than many academic Orientalist works. The Musée d'art et d'histoire de Narbonne holds this work, which reveals a side of Carpeaux's practice less widely known than his sculpture.

Carpeaux brings his sculptor's sense of three-dimensional form to the painted figure, modelling the face with a plastic awareness of underlying bone structure that differs from painters who trained primarily in the flat medium. The palette is warm, with ochres and burnt siennas giving the skin tones their characteristic warmth. Handling is confident and direct.