The Daughter of Caesar

The Daughter of Caesar, painted around 1874, draws on Roman imperial history to produce the kind of orientalized antiquity that was a distinct subset of academic painting — the world of the later Roman Empire, particularly in its Eastern provinces and during the reigns of emperors associated with Eastern luxury and decadence. 'The daughter of Caesar' is a generic designation rather than a reference to a specific historical figure, evoking the imperial household of Rome as a space of hereditary power and protected seclusion analogous to the Ottoman harem. Benjamin-Constant was not alone in conflating Roman imperial and Islamic Oriental imagery: Alma-Tadema, Gérome, and others mined Roman antiquity for subjects that permitted the same luxury surfaces and female figure studies as contemporaneous Orientalist painting while adding the prestige of classical antiquity. Painted at the same moment as his earliest Moroccan subjects, this canvas suggests the young Benjamin-Constant exploring the full range of exoticized historical spaces available to an academic painter of the period.

The Roman imperial setting allows Benjamin-Constant to deploy marble, mosaic, and Mediterranean light in place of Moroccan tile and diffuse interior atmosphere. His academic training in classical figure work supports the subject, while his emerging coloristic ambition brings warmth to a setting that could easily become cold and archaeological.