Fanning the coals
Clearing the stem.
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Clearing the stem.
For the nineteenth-century European viewer, the hookah became one of the most recognizable objects signifying "the East" — not so much the actual Middle East and North Africa as an image of it, constructed by the imagination of French and English painters, writers, and the organizers of world's fairs. This image is called Orientalism, and it is impossible to make sense of the hookah's history in European art without understanding what Orientalism was as a cultural lens — and where that lens systematically distorted its subject.
Orientalism in the visual arts is a movement of the second half of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth, in which European painters turned to subjects, costumes, and interiors associated with the Ottoman Empire, the Arab Maghreb, and other territories of "the East" in the broad and blurred sense Europeans themselves gave that word. The overwhelming majority of such paintings were not, and did not claim to be, ethnographic documentation. The classic example is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the movement's foremost master, who never once visited the Ottoman Empire or North Africa: his harem scenes are entirely studio fantasies, assembled from prints, studies, and imagination. A significant share of the "Oriental" canvases that became canonical depict not a reality seen through European eyes, but a European fantasy about a reality those eyes never actually saw.
This does not mean all Orientalists were equally removed from their subject: some painters did travel through Egypt, Turkey, and the Maghreb and worked from studies made on site. But even travel experience did not turn their paintings into a neutral record of what was seen — it passed through the filter of Salon expectations, commercial demand for the exotic, and entrenched notions of the harem and languor as attributes of "Oriental" life. Contemporary art history assesses Orientalism precisely on these terms: as a construction of the image of the Other, serving above all the European viewer himself — his curiosity and aesthetic expectations — rather than as documentary testimony about the lives of the people depicted. Within this system of images, the hookah is not a household object but one of the identifying markers of "Orientalness," alongside the turban, the peacock fan, and the incense burner — a detail that let the Salon viewer instantly read a scene as "not here, not now, not about us."
The best-known episode in the history of the hookah in European painting concerns Eugène Delacroix. In 1832 he accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco and Algiers and was granted a privilege rare for a European — access to the home of an Algerian corsair, where he was permitted to sketch the interior chambers and the women of the household. From these sketches he painted, in Paris in 1833, "Women of Algiers in their Apartment" — three women on cushions around a narghile and a kanun brazier, in the muted, almost intimate lighting of a harem interior.
The painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1834 and bought that same year by King Louis-Philippe for the museum of the Luxembourg Palace; in 1874 it passed to the Louvre, where it remains today. Its reception was contentious: the critic Gustave Planche, writing in the "Revue des deux mondes," praised the painterly craft — its freshness, the energy of the brushwork, the "Venetian" boldness of the color — but the painter's very right to depict such a scene raised questions: a European in principle had no access to the women's quarters of a household, and the authenticity of this intimate, almost voyeuristic vantage point was disputed from the outset. The combination of Delacroix's rare personal access to a real interior and his idealized artistic treatment of the material makes "Women of Algiers" a telling case: not an invention in the manner of studio Orientalists like Ingres, but not reportage either.
Where Delacroix had at least once seen a closed women's space, Ingres built his harem scenes entirely out of ready-made cultural signs. In "La Grande Odalisque" (1814, Louvre), the nude figure is accompanied by objects meant to read as "Turkish": a hookah pipe propped against an incense burner with smoking incense, and a peacock fan. Art historians note that these attributes — the pipe, the fan, the jeweled turban — were introduced into the composition not for ethnographic accuracy but to shift the nude figure out of the "French present" into a notionally Turkish space, thereby softening the scandal of the nudity itself for the Salon public.
The same line of work includes "Odalisque with Slave," which Ingres painted in Rome in 1839 on commission from Charles Marcotte — at the time he was head of the French Academy in Rome and, as with "La Grande Odalisque," had never actually been to Egypt or the Ottoman Empire. In the painting a nude odalisque listens to a musician, and beside her, among her master's gifts, a hookah is depicted — a detail that evokes the genre of the Oriental tale rather than observation. The first version is held at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts); the second, executed by Ingres with his students in 1842, is at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Jean-Léon Gérôme occupies a special place in the history of Orientalism: unlike Ingres, he traveled repeatedly to the Middle East — notably his 1868 trip to Egypt and Asia Minor, after which his Paris studio filled with Oriental props he had brought back. It is precisely this mixture of travel experience and studio staging that makes Gérôme's painting an interesting case: the viewer reads it as ethnographically authentic because the objects are real, even as the scene is still constructed in the studio to meet the demands of the Paris Salon.
The hookah is a recurring element in Gérôme's such stagings. "Arnaut Smoking" (1865, private collection) depicts a man in the costume of an arnaut — the French term for Albanian mercenaries in Ottoman service — in the act of drawing on a hookah. His later work "The Hookah Lighter" (circa 1898, now in the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum in Kyiv) combines a nude female figure in academic style with the same Oriental props — using them just as Ingres had half a century earlier: as a marker legitimizing the nude through Oriental trappings.
Orientalist painting did not arise out of nothing — it fed on a tradition of European travel literature about the East that by the nineteenth century was already more than a century old. One of the early and significant texts of this kind was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Turkish Embassy Letters" — the wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul, she accompanied her husband there in 1716–1718; published posthumously in 1763, they are considered the first secular work by a European woman about the Muslim East, and they describe the everyday spaces of Ottoman women's leisure, including the hammam, which Montagu calls the "women's coffeehouse," after the function of social gathering it served.
The tradition of French Oriental travel prose was continued in the next generation by Gérard de Nerval, whose book "Voyage en Orient" (1851) grew out of a trip to Cairo and Beirut in the early 1840s, and by Théophile Gautier with his book "Constantinople" (1853), based on a trip to the Ottoman capital in the summer of 1852. Both texts belong to the same cultural current that fed Salon painting: the writer travels to the East to describe it for the Parisian reader, and his descriptions of the street life and coffeehouses of Cairo or Istanbul become another source of images, alongside the paintings.
Perhaps the most widely reproduced image of the hookah in nineteenth-century English-language culture has nothing to do with Orientalism as a painterly movement — it arose in a children's book. In Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), Alice meets a Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah. John Tenniel's illustration is built on a visual paradox: the caterpillar's body is shown in profile, yet a human face is formed out of its head and front segments, and an arm holding the hookah pipe emerges from a wide sleeve, as if the caterpillar were simultaneously an insect and an Oriental sage in a robe; the hookah's hose coils around the figure in a closed loop. The drawing was engraved onto the printing block by the Dalziel Brothers workshop.
Tellingly, the hookah here is completely severed from its Middle Eastern context: it does not mark "the East" as a distant place but has been turned into an attribute of an absurd character in an English literary fairy tale — evidence that by the mid-nineteenth century the hookah had already become firmly embedded in the European visual repertoire and could be used outside the Orientalist frame, simply as a recognizable smoking implement with a tinge of strangeness.
The second channel through which the hookah reached the field of vision of the European mass public was the world's fair. At the 1867 Paris World's Fair, a café operated inside the Egyptian pavilion, offering visitors coffee, a chibouk — a Turkish smoking pipe — and a hookah, free of charge: a documented instance of Eastern-style smoking being displayed not as a painting but as a direct attraction.
Even larger in scale was "Rue du Caire" at the 1889 Paris World's Fair — a reconstructed "Egyptian" street some one hundred fifty meters long, with cafés, artisans' stalls, and a minaret replicating a fifteenth-century building; the café served Turkish coffee, and dancers performed there in the evenings. By the fair's financial results, "Rue du Caire" was the second most profitable pavilion after the Eiffel Tower — evidence of just how high commercial demand was for an "Oriental" experience in the form of entertainment rather than education. These exhibition "streets" and "cafés" were a functional extension of Orientalist painting: they turned the oil-painted image of the East into a set one could physically walk through and see the hookah not on canvas but in the flesh.
The fashion for "the Oriental" also penetrated the private interiors of wealthy Europeans and Americans. In the 1870s and 1880s, "Turkish smoking rooms" — spaces with low divans, carpets, and narghiles, decorated in the manner of Orientalist painting — spread through the wealthy homes of England and the United States. One of the earliest documented examples of such a room in a private house is considered to be the smoking room of Victoria Mansion in the United States, decorated by the firm Herter Brothers — yet another form of the same phenomenon: collecting not the East itself, but its image.
The image created by Delacroix in 1834 did not remain the property of the nineteenth century alone. Pablo Picasso created a series of fifteen paintings and numerous drawings under the collective title "Les Femmes d'Alger," working on it from December 13, 1954, to February 14, 1955 — as a direct response to Delacroix's painting, which he had gone to the Louvre specifically to study over the course of many years. The last, fifteenth painting in the series, "Version O" (1955), sold at Christie's in New York in May 2015 for 179.4 million dollars, setting at the time an absolute price record for a work of art at public auction — evidence of how firmly the image born at the Salon of 1834 had taken root in the cultural memory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
By the early twentieth century the hookah, as a visual sign of "Oriental" languor, had migrated from gallery painting into mass print culture — onto sheet-music covers, advertising posters, and postcards, where its silhouette was used as a recognizable label for the theme of "the distant and sensuous East." This is the final point in a process that began with the pipe in Ingres's painting: an object depicted as an alien attribute of an exotic world eventually becomes an independent, commercially exploited visual cliché — worth bearing in mind today, when so much of mass culture continues to reproduce precisely this century-old Orientalist image rather than any actual practice.
What is Orientalism in painting, and why does it need critical distance?
It's a movement of the second half of the eighteenth century and all of the nineteenth, in which European painters depicted "Oriental" costumes, interiors, and subjects out of imagination rather than observation; the overwhelming majority of such paintings are not ethnographic documentation but a construction of the image of the Other that served above all the European viewer.
Which hookah painting did Delacroix create, and what makes it notable?
"Women of Algiers in their Apartment" (1834, now in the Louvre) — painted from rare personal sketches made inside the home of an Algerian corsair; the combination of that rare access to a real interior with idealized artistic treatment makes it neither an invention in the manner of Ingres nor straightforward reportage.
How is the hookah used in the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland?
In John Tenniel's illustration, the hookah is completely severed from its Middle Eastern context and turned into an attribute of an absurd character in an English fairy tale — evidence that by the mid-nineteenth century it had entered the European visual repertoire outside the Orientalist frame.
How was the hookah displayed to the public at world's fairs?
At the 1867 Paris fair, a café in the Egyptian pavilion offered visitors free coffee, a chibouk, and a hookah; at the 1889 fair, "Rue du Caire" with its cafés and minaret became the second most profitable pavilion after the Eiffel Tower.
How did Delacroix's painting influence twentieth-century art?
Pablo Picasso created his "Femmes d'Alger" series (1954–1955) as a direct response to it; the series' last painting, "Version O," sold at Christie's in May 2015 for 179.4 million dollars, setting at the time an absolute price record for a work of art at public auction.