Woman in Moorish Costume

Woman in Moorish Costume reflects Bazille's interest in Orientalist subjects, a fashionable mode in French painting throughout the Second Empire period that his Montpellier background made particularly accessible. Montpellier had historical connections to North Africa through the Mediterranean trade routes, and Bazille's southern French upbringing gave him a different relationship to Orientalist subjects than the purely academic interest of his Paris contemporaries. The Moorish costume as a painterly subject offered the combination of exotic fabric and figure study that attracted many French painters, though Bazille's treatment is more direct and less fantastical than the academic Orientalism of Gérôme or Fromentin.

The costume subject allows Bazille to work with the elaborately patterned fabrics, bright colors, and metallic accessories of North African dress, which he renders with careful attention to texture contrast — rough wool, smooth silk, embroidered decoration. His figure modeling uses the direct natural light approach of his outdoor subjects even in this studio interior.