The Marabou

Gérôme's 'The Marabou' (1888) belongs to his North African Orientalist subjects — a marabout being an Islamic holy man or his tomb, both common features of North African religious landscape. Gérôme painted the built environments of Islam with the same documentary precision he brought to ancient Egyptian subjects, his images of mosques, minarets, and sacred sites carrying the authority of a painter who had actually traveled to and carefully observed these places. By the late 1880s he was also producing polychrome sculptures of some of his most successful painted subjects.

Gérôme renders the North African religious environment with his characteristic smooth, photographic precision — the architectural details of Islamic construction accurately observed and carefully rendered. His light handling captures the harsh North African sun, its strong directional quality creating clear, hard-edged shadows quite different from the diffused light of his European studio works. The color palette is authentically North African: sandy ochres, bright whites, and the intense blue of the sky.