This horizontal painting shows a daylit, covered terrace, where two women with pale skin and wearing long dresses lounge and recline along a ledge as a turbaned man with dark brown skin plays a musical instrument. To our left, behind one of the women, the musician's white turban drapes around his neck. His white shirt has wide, salmon-pink cuffs. His head is bent over a stringed instrument with a light yellow rounded body and a long, narrow wooden neck. His features are mostly lost in shadow but his closed lips are dark pink. Behind and framing the musician, a dark green drapery with gold edging cuts across the top left corner of the painting and is drawn back to reveal a bright sea view beyond.
   Close to us, one woman wears an orange-red dress with gold embroidery and a low-cut transparent blouse that shows her pale skin beneath. She lounges on her back, head near the musician, and body splayed along the ledge out toward our right. Her eyes are half-closed, and her head rests on a large gold pillow with green and pink embroidery over which her long, dark red hair cascades. Her left arm is bent and thrown back behind her head while her right arm hangs limply toward the floor. Her extended legs are bent, and feet with red and gold pointed slippers emerge from the bottom of the dress. Beyond her legs and to our right, the second woman reclines in a gold and cream-white dress with a filmy top and gold jacket. She rests her head in her hand, propped up by a crooked elbow resting on the ledge, while her body extends to our right. She gazes at us with dark eyes. She has dark brown, wavy hair that flows behind her shoulders, and she wears a gold headband with round, coin-like links.
   Beyond the group of three, another man stands to the far right in the background, in a corner of the terrace patio next to a pillar. Like the other man, he has dark brown skin and wears a turban, a loose white shirt under a yellow vest, and light blue, loose trousers. The back of the terrace opens to a bright and sunny day, the light blue sky scattered with thin white clouds above a vivid blue sea, where three sailboats approach the port. Distant mountains are bathed in light and appear pink, beyond the white roofs of the port or village along the water's edge, to our left.

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com

   Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant was among the preeminent painters of orientalist subjects in France in the latter decades of the 19th century. In 1859, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse where he remained until 1866 when a municipal scholarship allowed him to continue his artistic training in Paris. In 1871, Benjamin-Constant embarked upon an extended sojourn, spending the better part of two years abroad, traveling first through Moorish Spain before joining Charles Joseph Tissot, French plenipotentiary to Morocco. During the artist's 16-month stay he collected artifacts and made sketches and studies that would provide the basis for his numerous compositions in the years to come.

   By the mid-1870s, Benjamin-Constant had established a reputation as painter of orientalist subjects, ranging from grim and occasionally violent genre scenes, to opulent and visually alluring harem scenes. The Favorite of the Emir, painted in 1879, is typical of the latter category. Like many of his contemporaries, Benjamin-Constant was an admirer of Eugéne Delacroix. Benjamin-Constant's first teacher, Jules Garipuy, had been a student of Delacroix. In this painting, Delacroix's influence is evident not only in the subject matter but also in the lush palette and painterly surface. Benjamin-Constant puts his own distinctive stamp upon the work, however. This is most notable in the spatial construction of the painting and the sharp contrast he established between the rich patterning of the fabrics displayed in the foreground and the flat planes of vivid color in the background.

   Benjamin-Constant took great delight in the juxtaposition of the richly embroidered fabric against the smooth pale flesh of the women's arms and chests and the subtle variations between the two women. On the right, the darkhaired woman gazes directly at the viewer while her companion is shown fully in repose, her body relaxed and her eyes closed as if lulled to sleep by the musician seated behind her. The paleness of her skin and her rich auburn hair suggest that she is not a native. Playing upon contemporary fantasies of European beauties who have been spirited away to lead the pampered, cloistered life of a courtesan in a harem—the inclusion of the man standing guard in the background at the far right of the composition serves as a reminder of the locale—Benjamin-Constant introduced an erotic charge into this exotic and visually seductive painting. This painting, the first by the artist to enter the Gallery's collection, is a gift of the United States Naval Academy Museum.

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com