In this unit, we're going to learn about gender issues as they relate to the Orientalist tradition in

academic painting of the early 20th century.

We'll begin with John Lavery's, In Morocco. A wonderfully lush Orientalist canvas, painted by
Lavery in 1912 when he was living in northern Morocco in the city of Tangier with his wife, Hazel
and daughter, Alice. They are both models for the picture.
In the 1890s, the Lavery's bought a house on the hill overlooking Tangier. Regularly living in that
city for extended periods of time over the next 30 years. The Australian artist, Hilda Rix Nicholas
visited the artist studio in 1912. She and her sister Elsie, visited the Laverys in their house on the
hill, and saw this very picture sitting on its easel in Sir John's studio. Elsie Rix wrote to their
mother, Elizabeth, in London. Mr Lavery's studio is very beautiful, the loveliest I've seen. He is
working on a beautiful canvas, an enormous one of his little girl, on a white horse, with his wife
standing beside her in the garden.
The whole colour scheme is delightful, especially the colour of his wife's dress.
There's a little Arab boy in a Djellaba in the picture, too. The whole scheme is lovely.
Later in this tutorial, we will consider Hilda Rix's Tangerian output
and how she, like that of many artists and writers of the period, took up a counter-Orientalist
position. But first, let's look at John Lavery's, In Morocco. When this vibrant, almost cinematic
painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1915, John Lavery was a very popular
artist in the UK, and this painting in Morocco was regarded as one of his masterpieces. Produced by
the artist at the peak of his powers and described by the reviewer in the London Observer as a work
of the rarest distinction.
The eye is drawn to it here in the Gallery, housing Modern British Art. And it when it arrived in
Melbourne, local critics praised it effusively for the sheer beauty of the scene it represented. The
consummate mastery of the drawing and the brilliant evocation of the fleeting effects of sunlight. In
this lovely painting, we see what Lavery was best known for in his Moroccan paintings. A talent for
brilliant composition, striking use of colour and light, and an attention to local costume. In addition,
his pictures are noteworthy for the record that they present us with today of the incursions of
Europeans into Morocco. The cosmopolitan nature of that city, and the powerful impact that the
Orientalist movement continued to play in the academic painting of the early 20th century.
Artists of the previous centuries, such as Eugene Delacroix, who visited Morocco and Algeria in the
early 1830s, produced his magnificent Women of Algiers in their apartment of 1834. He painted
well-known Orientalist themes centred on the harems and the paschas of Morocco and Algeria. But
artists of the early 20th century were concerned rather about the formal qualities of paint, colour,
light and composition, focusing on the every day life of the Maghreb, and their enjoyment of it. In
this week's unit, we will consider John Lavery's painting from a number of perspectives. Including
the manner in which women are represented within Orientalist pictures, the role of the model in
early 20th century painting, and the politics of museum display.
We will also look at some of the work produced by Hilda Rix Nicholas, who was painting in
Tangier over the same period.
In this evocative study of light and color, we see the artist's family in the compound of Dar-el-
Midfa, their home in Tangiers. Young Alice is mounted on Lilly Bo, her Arab stallion dressed in
lavish Arabian trimmings. While Hazel Lady Lavery stands next to the young equestrian giving her
a steady hand. A Moroccan lad restrains the family's greyhound. Lady Lavery is wearing a hooded
cream Djellaba, traditionally worn by both men and women in Morocco.
As Dr. Caroline Wallace will explain in a moment, Hazel Lavery was herself an artist, but here she
acts as her husband's model, as she had done on many occasions before. If we think back to our
work on the representation of men and women in art, and the way in which the gaze operates, how
would you characterise the power or agency of the three figures here represented? Are the Lavery
women represented as active or passive figures? What role does the young boy play in the
composition?
And what about the animals? How do they interact with the human figures in the composition?
The appearance of the Lavery family in Orientalist costume, right down to the family's domestic
animals, has political overtones, and is not merely relevant from a decorative or artistic viewpoint.
Men and women have figured in an enormous range of Orientalist paintings, produced by artists
from all over Europe and America for many centuries. The largest body of work came from French
and British artists, and their interests dates before the Napoleonic age when incursions into North
Africa and the Middle East began, and continued to expand into the 20th century.
Intellectual interest followed economic ambition. During the late 17th and early 18th centuries,
French writers, such as Racine and Moliere famously produced works based on narratives around
Turkish themes.
With Turkish arts, costume and architecture becoming the subject of sustained French scholarship.
Artists such as Jean-Etienne Liotard and Jean-Antoine Watteau, visiting the Turkish court in
Constantinople. Painted portraits of Turkish dignitaries in what the West described as Oriental
costume.
In 1704, the Arabian Nights were translated into French, and an English translation followed two
years later. But it was not until Richard Burton's 1885 translation, that the work became a hit in the
English-speaking world. The lives of the Pashas and the Sultans also appeared in the work of artists
such as Francois Boucher and Jean-Honore' Fragonard. Whose courtly canvases we've already
studied. But after Napoleon's incursion into Egypt, 1788-9, Orientalism underwent an explosion in
cosmopolitan centres throughout Europe.
There had been interest in Morocco by European artists over many centuries. Largely because of its
proximity to Europe, and its strategic position in relation to the Mediterranean.
Spain claimed control over the North African coast in the early 17th century, and England
established a naval colony there as early as 1661.
France formally annexed Algeria much later in 1830. It became France's largest and most
prosperous colony. Following the consolidation of French rule in Algeria, the government prepared
to send a delegation to Morocco in 1832. With the aim of extending its influence into the
region. The French sent a diplomatic mission, that included Eugene Delacroix, who was 34 when he
arrived in Morocco on January the 25th, 1832. Beginning his famous Moroccan diaries the next
day.
During his time in Tangier, Delacroix completed an impressive body of work. He spent three days
in Algiers, where he prepared the sketches for Women of Algiers. This painting became a favourite
work among the Parisian art world, entering the Louvre in 1874. Paul Cezanne admired it greatly,
and Picasso reinterpreted the painting in his own Women of Algiers after Delacroix. One of the
three series of variations on past masterpieces that he completed in the 1950s. The Scottish array
painter David Roberts, also traveled to Tangier in the early 1830s. And 50 years later, Monet and
Renoir visited North Africa at different times. Delacroix's diary and his work inspired many other
artists to visit Tangier, including the American artists Louis Comfort Tiffany and Robert Swain.
So when Hilda Rix Nicholas and John Lavery found themselves painting in Tangier in 1912, they
were treading a relatively well-worn path that had been prepared for them through the exigencies of
colonialism.
As two individual artists, they also approached their subject matter quite differently.
In a moment, we will examine Hilda Rix's work in the context of the gendering of Orientalism. But
before we do so, let's consider In Morocco as a picture in a museum. How does the way the work is
represented in the museum environment influence our gendered perceptions of it?

I'm Caroline Wallace. I lecture in art history and gender studies at The University of
Melbourne. Let's consider now what role the museum plays in the display of works of art, such as
John Lavery's In Morocco.
When we look around art museums we see a story, a cultural narrative. We see stories of technical,
stylistic and formal development. We see a changing history with the move from religious arts to
secular patronage to the individualism of modern art.
Art historian Carol Duncan has described art museums as codified spaces for ritual, comparable to
churches or cathedrals. This provides a useful way to think about how we engage with art in such
spaces, in hushed tones, treading quietly, looking up to admire worshipfully great works of art.
Artworks are presented in a way that is very different to how we engage with visual material in the
outside real world. They are isolated and literally held aloft for our admiration and
contemplation. What we are admiring is beauty, rather then the history of the objects or their
context of production. This is due to the fact that museums as a concept emerge in late 18th century
Europe and are a testament of the aesthetic ideas of the Enlightenment.
In the room where John Lavery's In Morocco is hung at the NGV, we see a number of other works
produced by British artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What these works share is the
nationality of their artists, but grouping them together in a space, in a single line across the
wall, draws out other shared qualities.
The most overt shared characteristic is the subject matter. When we wander through galleries of
19th and early 20th century European art, we gaze up at the faces of beautiful women.
Staged in interiors, cast in mythological stories, or portrayed as allegorical virtues. Women are a
visual language.
The beauty that museums invite us to contemplate is gendered.
Positioned just above our eye level, these women never quite look back at us directly. Instead they
look just past us, eyes averted, allowing us to look at them without reproach. These women are as
decorative as the gild frames in which they're displayed.
In this space, Lady Hazel Lavery, the central figure in In Morocco is just another face amongst the
multitude. It is fitting that she is dressed in costume in this image, since she is performing the role
of model for her husband John Lavery. She looks coyly at the viewer, who is placed in the position
of the painter capturing the scene. There is a sense of the stage about this work, with the wall in the
background enclosing the space and figures deliberately grouped in a triangular shape.
The blue parasol which frames Hazel's head draws our attention, and echoes the blue sky around her
daughter's head, creating a connection between the two women, which is reaffirmed in the colour of
their dress.
However, there is a difference between the direct stare of Alice, mounted on the elaborately
decorated horse, and Hazel's sideways glance.
The difference between girl and woman is spelled out. The lack of sexual awareness versus
seductive femininity.
Hazel's face, half hidden in shadow, reveals little. She is a symbol for women and beauty in this
work, as she is in many of Lavery's paintings for which she was a recurrent model.
In Morocco, like the other women's faces hanging nearby in the gallery, she's merely a decorative
figure. We can pass over her face without much curiosity as easily as we look at the decorative
embellishments on the horse's saddle.
However, if we saw this work surrounded by different objects, we might read it slightly
differently. What if instead of reading this as a beautiful work of technical skill by John Lavery, we
read it as portrait of the artist Hazel Lavery?
Born in America in 1880, the then Hazel Martin had already studied etching in Paris before she met
John Lavery while on a sketching holiday in Brittany in 1904. He praised not only her beauty, but
also her artistic skill. Although Hazel entered into a marriage in America after this first meeting, the
two married a few years later in 1909, after Hazel was widowed and the mother of the young Alice.
One of the first paintings John Lavery produced of her was Mrs. Lavery Sketching in 1910. In this
work, the formally dressed Hazel is presented dominating the canvas as she sketches en plein
air. The presence of her artistic tools gives her agency and identity which differs to In Morocco, and
her gaze is far more direct.
Would we read In Morocco differently if Mrs. Lavery's sketching was hanging next to it? What
would happen if Hazel's Portrait of John, painted in 1921 was also part of this narrative? This work
is one of Hazel's few surviving paintings and shows her not inconsiderable skill as an artist. If it
were hanging next to In Morocco, we would see a reciprocal view, each artist painting the
other. And Hazel's gaze might be read differently. Instead of a coy flirtation, it could be an artistic
eyeing up.
However, it was John, not Hazel, who became the renowned artist, and whose work entered the
NGV collection. Hazel all but retired from art making in favour of the role of society
hostess, artistic muse and studio model. So Hazel's face recurs throughout John's paintings, in
various different settings, but always as a slightly distant, seductive beauty.
Hazel's career as an artist folded for the same reason that so many women's did through the
European art history. The difficulties of facing a system where women were outsiders in the world
of art, to be looked at but not expected to do the looking. It is a structural difficulty women faced in
pursuing careers as artists that was subject of Linda Nochlin's 1971 article, Why Have There Been
No Great Female Artists? In this influential article, which marked the beginnings of the feminist art
history, Nochlin pointed out the difficulties facing women who wanted to be artists throughout
history. For example, she asked whether Picasso, had he been born a girl, would have had access to
the kind of early training which set him on the road to success.
Looking again at Hazel Lavery we can see that she faced obstacles of expectation, access and
acceptability in undertaking her career as an artist. Difficulties that saw her instead play the far
more socially acceptable role of model to her artist husband. In this she was not alone. This path
from early artistic ambition to model wife is one taken by a number of women throughout art
history. When we know their stories, see their work, and hear their voices, we see them very
differently to the anonymous beauties who decorate the galleries and museums. Hazel Lavery's face
looks down on us at the NGV. We can see her knowingly playing the role, actively participating in
the way she is seen. What is crucial is to understand that our reading of artworks can change
depending on the environment we see them in and the information we are presented with.
The way we read gender in such spaces is a product of the space, which works we are shown and
how they are presented.

The Australian artist, Hilda Rix Nicholas, saw John Lavery's picture while she was visiting his
Tangier studio during her first trip to Morocco in 1912. Hilda Rix was one of the first Australian
artists to visit Morocco. During her time in Tangier, she stayed at the Hotel Villa de France over
precisely the same eight weeks. That the French painter, Henri Matisse stayed there too.
During this time, Hilda began to experiment with Post-Impressionism. She applied the paint broadly
upon the canvas, in loose brush strokes, flattening out the picture plane. And taking up a pallet that
worked more with primary colours than she had in her previous academic work.
Matisse was of course the inventor of fauvism and perhaps, the most famous artist to practiced in a
broadly defined style of first expressionism.
Hilda Rix had studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, before going abroad with her
mother and sister to study in London and Paris. And here, we have a photograph of the three
women in the middle of their journey. In Paris, she studied at the Academy Delécluse and
Colarossi’s. At this time Matisse had a studio in Paris. And, like a number of other established
artists, he also occasionally attended Colarossi’s for the access that it gave him to working from a
model without having to go to the trouble of hiring one for himself.
Matisse also regularly held an open studio, to which he invited students to learn and to experiment
with him.
It is possible that Hilda Rix met Matisse in Paris before she went to Morocco, and that her sojourn
in Tangier, which exactly overlapped the two months of Matisse's time there, was not coincidental.
They both painted views from the windows of their rooms at the Hotel Ville de France. As well as
views of the Bob El Asa, the gate which marked the entry to Tangier. They shared models. Rix
Nicholas' study in pastels of a young Moroccan youth entitled Hamido Sleeps is drawn from the
same model as Matisse's Moroccan Hamido, which forms part of his triptage in the hermitage. And
Matisse's Zorah sur la Terrasse is painted from the same sitter as Rix Nicholas' Young Arab Girl. We
know that Matisse rarely worked en plein aire, preferring the studio. And while he was in Tangier,
the privacy of his hotel room where he painted views of the landscape and bouquets of irises
brought in from the marketplace.
Both of the artists complained in their letters home, of the rainy weather which prevented them
from getting out and about.
Despite the rain, Matisse did paint his study of the acanthus plant
in the garden of the Villa Brooks that dominated the landscape behind the Hotel Villa de France.
Matisse painted flowers throughout his long life, and was one of the few main stream male
artists whose artistic practice continually returned to the floral motif.
In this regard, Henri Matisse ignored the gender stereotype that placed the painting of flowers as an
essential female occupation.
Hilda also ignored it, producing few floral studies herself and concentrating on what at the time was
considered to be a male occupation, the painting of portraits and of national life.
When it came to painting the men and women of the Australian bush, she frequently quipped that
she was quote, the man for the job.
During her two trips to Tangier, Hilda painted out in the souk, or the soko as it is called in
Tangier, recording the life of the marketplace in a distinctly post impressionist style.
Her ‘Morocco marketplace with the pile of oranges’ is a good example of the changes that her style
underwent in Morocco. Painting with flowing brush strokes in thick slabs of impasto, Rix clearly
delineates her figures through a line in the centre of the composition.
Framed by buildings in the background and a large pile of oranges arranged haphazardly across the
foreground. The striped skirts and bright haiks of mountain woman are deftly called in deliberate
strokes of red. And the multi-coloured costumes of two men located to the right-hand side of the
composition bring the painting into focus.
She painted families, such as the delightful small group located in the right-hand corner of through
the arch to the sea,
who were seen standing on the cobblestones of a small alleyway that opens on to the sea.
The white stone houses of the coast are seen in relief in the centre of the composition.
Painting on her own in the soko presented Hilda Rix with challenges. The embargo on the making
of images which was part of strictly observed Islamic law meant that the act of painting was
frowned upon in some circles in Morocco. And even by some Muslims, forbidden.
However, she managed to get the life of the market recorded onto her canvas.
The dress and appearance of the market crowd occupied Hilda from the outset.
In one of her first letters home she included a drawing and described the dress and appearance of
the women of Tangier.
She wrote, see how most of them are covering their faces? They have mostly cream draperies. And
perhaps orange waistcoats, and little tight, mauve or green trousers, tied at the ankle.
Some she noted, however, may be wonderfully dressed underneath.
As it was difficult to paint in oils in the marketplace, she executed most of her soko works in
pencils and crayons.
She did however manage to finish a number of oil paintings there. And the work in oil entitled Arab
Marketplace is one of them.
The paint is freely handled, creating the effect of the busy of store holders and bargaining shoppers.
A woman with a wide-brimmed hat and a large scarf is seen in the centre right of the painting.
These large hats are still worn by berber women in the marketplace in Tangier.
Useful, undoubtedly, for keeping cool and shading the body. A few days later, she wrote again to
her mother and sister in London.
Picture me in this marketplace.
I spend nearly every day here, for it fascinates me absolutely. I've done 16 drawings and 2 oils so
far. I'm feeling thoroughly at home now, so I'm going to take out my big oil box. I wanted to get use
to the people and the things first. Oh I do love it all.
While painting in public was tricky for a western woman in Tangier, in the early 20th century, it
clearly was not impossible.
Tangier was a cosmopolitan community with a Christian and Jewish quarter.
Located very close to Spain, it had a long history of contact with Europe.
European artist visited Tangier from at least the 17th century. And by the middle of the 19th
century, Spanish, French, American, and British academic artists, regularly traveled there to paint.
Art followed imperial design and commerce. France annexed Algeria in 1830. And the great French
Painter, Eugene Delacroix was part of the official French delegation to Algiers,
also visiting and painting in Tangier.
The Scottish painter David Roberts visited in 1833 and Horace Vernet and Eugene Fromentin
followed in the 1840s.
The American artists Louis Comfort Tiffany and Robert Swain painted in the soko in Tangier in the
early 1870's.
With Tiffany famously noting, 'When I first had a chance to travel in the east and to paint with the
people and the buildings are clad in beautiful hues,
the preeminence of colour in the world was brought forcibly to my attention.’
The Orientals, he wrote, had been teaching the Occidentals how to use colours for the past 10,000
years. By the middle of the 19th century, many European women traveled to the east. Some, like
Lady Isabel Burton and Barbara Bodichon
wrote wonderful accounts of their travels, and by the turn of the 20th century, female artists began
to arrive in Tangier to paint.
The New Zealand artist, Francis Hodgkins visited Tangier, producing views of the marketplace in
1905. And in 1911, the Australians Emanuel Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick travelled to North
Africa to paint, spending some weeks in Tangier, and staying also at the Hotel Villa de France.
Fox painted the view from their hotel room.
When Hilda’s sister Elsie Rix arrived at the hotel on their 1914 visit, she recognised the view from
the painting she had seen at the Fox's studio in Paris,
exclaiming that the Fox's must've occupied the same room as their own. Fox evokes the feeling of
standing in the open air, overlooking Tangier. Gazing across the Mediterranean to Spain in his
picture.
The viewer is situated on the windward side of the hotel, gazing across the Straits of Gibraltar,
directly onto the Spanish coast.
The sea is rough and waves have white caps indicating a wind strength that would have made
crossings over the strait a challenge for which it was famous.
Hilda painted a similar view from the hotel, her view of Tangier emphasises the whitestone houses
facing seaward. Presenting a study of the bill top landscape of the port in
She used a subtle pallet of creamy white and pink tones to build up her image of the white city, and
painted bands of blue and green in the middle and background to delineate the foliage and the
mediterranean sea.
This breaks up the composition, presenting a pleasant prospect.
The houses in the landscape are organised inCezanne-esque blocks of colour in this modernist
rendering of the coastal landscape of Tangier.
Rix Nicholas however painted relatively few landscapes in Tangier, choosing rather to focus on the
everyday life of Moroccans. And striving to illustrate the particular nature of the culture of
Maghreb at the same time stressing the bonds and similarities which Europeans and Moroccans
shared.
Her works made it clear that women played a prominent role in the public life of the
market. Showing the ease, in which they accessed commercial life in Tangier.
Her work in pastel of berber women selling coal, brought to market on their camels, shows
independent women undertaking commercial roles in a public place.
She wrote to her mother Elizabeth and to Elsie in London of the female cameliers.
Oh how you would love being with me today in the big soko. While a merry interested crowd
gathered behind me, I put into my foreground one of the many women who had tramped 15 miles
bearing a heavy load.
She wore a scant attire made of a series of towels. Her face, all but the eyes, bound and veiled.
Her legs were encased in primitive leather gaiters. Which is rare to see.
The heels of her shoes were turned up. Because she had passed through boggy country. Coming
from inland to this port city.
I got in my sketch before the teasing crowd had succeeded in making her understand what I was
about. Hurray! Then, I slipped away. And got lost in the gaily coloured multitude.
While male artists working in an Orientalist idiom in North Africa, especially, those working in the
19th century, were interested in painting the well worn themes of orientalism such as the adventures
of the paschas and their harems, Hilda took what might be described as a counter-orientalist view.
While seeking to show the texture and colour of the inhabitants of the city of Tangier, she also
wanted to show the everyday life of Tangierians, especially the women with their families and their
animals.
Uniting the Arab experience with that of human beings everywhere.
Her gender enabled her to have closer contact with women in the public spaces of Tangier, allowing
her to observe, more closely than a male artist might have, the particular culture of the women of
the Maghreb.
Hilda Rix was one of the first Australian artists to paint in a post-impressionist style. Preceding the
men who critics claim as the pioneers of post impressionism in Australia by several years. She is
also, with Ethel Carrick and Emmanuel Phillips Fox,
one of the first Australian artists to attempt to translate the life of the Maghreb into paint.
After her expeditions to Morocco, Hilda Rix married an Australian sheep farmer,
transferring the skills she had developed in France and Morocco, to recording the culture of the
Australians.
Painting many images over her long career of every day life of people of pastoral Australia,
especially women.
Paintings such as the fair musterer are now as iconic of Australian life as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker.
During her time in Morocco, she encountered the most radical aspects of post impressionist practice
through her contact with Henri Matisse at one of the most experimental and radical moments of his
long life as an artist.
Both radicals in their own way, they would go on to disregard oppressive gender stereotypes
painting in a way that pleased them. And later, enriching the lives of the generations of art lovers
who followed.
You can visit and even stay at the Hotel Villa de France in Tangier. It is recently reopened after
many years. And experience for yourself, the moment in the Belle Epoch when the lives of Hilda
Rix and Henri Matisse crossed paths.
I do recommend it.