Seated Arabs

Seated Arabs (1877), held in the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York, belongs to the observational strand of Benjamin-Constant's Orientalist work — studies of men at rest, gathered in conversation or contemplation, that draw on his experience of Moroccan public life. The Dahesh Museum, founded by the Lebanese-American writer and mystic Salim Moussa Achi (known as Dr Dahesh), assembled one of the most important collections of academic and Orientalist painting in the Americas, and its acquisition of this work reflects the museum's deliberate effort to document the Orientalist tradition with works of documentary as well as artistic quality. Seated group studies of this kind provided Benjamin-Constant with opportunities to study the variety of North African male costume and physiognomy, building the visual vocabulary he deployed in his more elaborate narrative and interior compositions. The 1877 date places the work in the middle of his most productive Orientalist decade, when he was systematically working through the material gathered on his 1871–72 journey.

The composition arranges seated figures at varying depths and angles, allowing a study of the volumetric relationship between robed bodies in repose. Benjamin-Constant uses the varied fall of drapery — burnous, djellaba — to create rhythmic visual interest across what might otherwise be a static arrangement.