#RobertGavin #MicheleBerk

Season 2 Episode 22 "Summer of '85"

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Scottish painter Robert Gavin was known for his interest in Orientalism, the exaggerated and imaginative scenes often depicting people in North Africa and the Middle East. The same fascination with “exoticism” would lead Gavin to travel to the United States in 1868 to take on a new subject: Black and mixed-race people in New Orleans. This painting, likely produced during his time in Louisiana, depicts a young Creole woman of mixed European and Black descent. The unnamed person’s soft features and smooth brown skin are emphasized by the tignon wrapped around her head. A tignon was a piece of cloth worn as a turban headdress by free and enslaved Creole women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For fear of Creole women passing for white given their various shades of skin, Euro-Americans passed sumptuary laws to restrict the dress and appearance of people of color. However, Creole women subverted these laws by using colorful headscarves to enhance their appearance. Soon after Gavin returned home from America, he went to Morocco, and resided for some years at Tangier, where he painted numerous “Moorish”pictures. In 1879, he became an academician, and presented as his diploma work @The Moorish Maiden's First Love,” a damsel caressing a beautiful white horse; this picture is now in the collections of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture. He returned to Scotland in 1880, and continued to paint subjects of Moorish life and manners until his death in 1883.

“Head of a Creole Girl” by Robert Gavin (Scottish) - Oil on panel / c. 1868–1871 - Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, Maine) #womeninart #art #oilpainting #portraitofawoman #BowdoinCollegeMuseumofArt #RobertGavin #Gavin #BCMA #womensart #ScottishArtist #creole #artwork #ArtText #portrait