The Little Girls of Orientalism: Frederic Leighton’s Study at a Reading Desk (1877)

This article examines Study at a Reading Desk by the painter Frederic Leighton, highlighting an underexplored—yet significant—aspect of his work: Orientalist genre paintings of girls. I argue that Leighton reworked traditional European Orientalist tropes by resisting the typical eroticization of the female body and instead used Orientalist vernacular to explore the ‘otherness’ of girlhood. The article contributes to the study of Victorian Orientalism by shifting the focus from traditional depictions of the harem and odalisque to a more nuanced exploration of gendered and spatial dynamics. Drawing on Catherine Robson’s scholarship, I suggest that the painting reimagines the male self through the figure of the female adolescent. Through an exploration of the Islamic decorative arts depicted in the painting, I argue that Study at a Reading Desk is an affective image which elicits non-erotic forms of pleasure to restage the odalisque in light of Victorian sentimental paintings of children. The article offers a new avenue for reading Victorian representations of girlhood by integrating the complex roles of the girl model and the female subject in Orientalist visual culture.