Hookahs in Art

Rudolf Ottenfeld, Backgammon 1890

In July of 1798 Napoleon marched into Egypt with an army. He defeated the Turks at the battle of the Pyramids, stayed for a few weeks and then was driven out by the British. In the small amount of time that he was there he managed to change everything.

Following him came first a trickle and then a torrent of Westerners into the Near and Middle East. The artists and writers who were inspired by what they saw became known as the Orientalists. They travelled through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Arabia and North Africa. With time they have changed the Western perception of the East and influenced generations of artists.

Bashi-Bazouks singing , Jean-Leon Gerome, 1868

In the Western and Oriental imagination, water pipes appear as artistic artefacts. The Orientalist painters definitely had a taste for representing the Narghile. Here is a selection of works with Hookahs featured in them.

Women of Algiers in their Room, Eugene Delacroix, 1834.

Eugène Delacroix's painting Women in Algiers, makes use of rich and deep colours, fixed women sitting around a narghile.

La Servante De Harem, Paul-Désiré Trouillebert 1874

The harem handmaid ( 1874 ), in this painting, the "beautiful and cold topless slave" holds a tray supporting a small narghile. The long hose coils up around the mast in five to six loops.

Odalisque and Slave, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres 1839

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres creates an indolent atmosphere, an almost undressed woman, lies on a bed. In the foreground, to the right, discreetly stands a tiny narghile.

Ange Tissier, Une Algérienne

An Algerian woman and her slave (1860) features a woman, elegantly dressed in the old Turkish tradition, nonchalantly holding the hose of a narghile. She sits near a wooden table inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ebony.

Bashi-Bazouk Chieftain, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1881

Finally, the artist who most represented narghile, is Jean-Léon Gérôme. The Bashi-Bazouk featured above was a chieftain of mercenary troops of the Ottoman Empire. The pleated skirt and light skin shows that this chieftain is of Balkan origin. These skirts are still worn today as ceremonial dress in the Greek military. Gerome's painting was so accurate in recording detail that scholars used them as ethnological records.

Allumeuse de Narghilé by Jean-Léon Gérome

Another painting that deserves a mention is A Woman lighting a Narghile. A commentator noticed that there is a striking contrast between the nudity of the woman who carefully lights the narghile by the pool and others basking on the side of the pond, and a group of veiled women watching the scene, in the background, behind a hand-rail.