.jpg)
A Fallah Woman with Her Child, an oil painting on canvas completed by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann in 1878. The main subject is a fallah woman, a peasant or farmer, distinguished from the effendi land-owning class. It is held by the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. A Polish-Danish painter who had studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Jerichau-Baumann (1819–1881) completed this and similar works based on her experiences travelling the Ottoman Empire in 1869–1870 and 1874–1875. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she had access to the region's harems and could base her paintings on personal observation. Many of her subjects insisted on being painted in the latest Paris fashions, and Jerichau-Baumann depicted them with a fine sense of colour and lighting. Owing to their sensualism, some of these paintings were hidden by the contemporary European art world, often relegated to storage rooms.Painting: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann