Roger Fenton’s Pasha and Bayadère is a fascinating image in its own right and as an expression of the Orientalist craze that grew steadily stronger during the nineteenth century in Europe. In his rich and detailed study, Gordon Baldwin explains how this image of a seated man and a dancing woman embodies themes and motifs that can be found in the work of nineteenth-century artists from Eugène Delacroix to John Frederick Lewis and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He has also brought to light significant new information about the life and career of Roger Fenton, the important Victorian photographer best known for his photographs of the Crimean War.

Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadère is part of the Getty Museum Studies on Art, a series designed to introduce individual works of note or small groups of related works to a broad public with an interest in the history of art.

Each monograph is written by a leading scholar and features a close discussion of its subject as well as a detailed analysis of the broader historical and cultural context in which the work was created.

• Through Victorian Eyes: An Inventory of a Photograph
• Études: Fenton and French Orientalism
• Travelers’ Notes and Poet’s License: British Pictorial Orientalism
• Eastern Photographs and Artistic Applications
• Tableaux and Exotic Soldiery: Fenton’s Earlier Photographs
• The Orientalist Suite and Its Critical Reception
• Notes
• Acknowledgments

Gordon Baldwin is Associate Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He is the author of Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms.