Shisha in Art & Literature

21 Astonishing Cultural Sightings You Didn’t Know About

"Shisha in art" has endured because artists and writers use the waterpipe as a compact symbol of leisure, sociability, sensuality, and, at times, otherness. Paintings and novels that feature hookahs don't just document a pastime; they stage conversations about class, gender, empire, and the everyday.

In the Harem & Salon: European Orientalism meets the hookah.

1) Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834)

Delacroix's celebrated harem interior shows female figures in an enclosed domestic space with a hookah nearby, an object that helps encode leisure and eroticized "East" for 19th-century French audiences. This composition became a touchstone for later painters and a lightning rod for debates on Orientalism. See Christie's overview of the painting's reception and the hookah as a key prop; the original is in the Louvre.

2) Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger (1954–55) - modernist echoes

A century later, Picasso created fifteen versions riffing on Delacroix's scene. Curators note how Version L includes a woman holding a hookah, translating Delacroix's harem paraphernalia into Cubist geometry and monochrome drama. Reviews and essays from ArtNews/Art in America, as well as exhibition write-ups, document the hookah's persistence across Picasso's series.

3) Picasso's Seated Woman with Hookah (1954, drawing)

Beyond the Femmes d'Alger series, a work on paper titled Seated Woman with Hookah underscores how the motif seeped into Picasso's mid-1950s practice. Auction records register the piece and title.

4) Jean-Léon Gérôme's Arab Girl with Waterpipe (1873)

Gérôme's Orientalist portrait centers the waterpipe explicitly titled as such and positions it as an emblem of locale and lifestyle. Museum-quality databases record the date and subject; high-res references confirm the object and the sitter's pose.

5) Rudolf Ernst's Smoking the Hookah

Austrian Orientalist Rudolf Ernst frequently staged opulent interiors where figures recline beside hookahs. Catalog and art-reference entries list Smoking the Hookah among his best-known canvases, reinforcing how the object became shorthand for cultivated idleness in salon culture.

6) Ludwig Deutsch's The Smoker (1903)

Deutsch's crystalline finish turns fabrics, tiles, and brass into spectacle; the sitter contemplates while a hookah anchors the foreground. Public-domain records and art-history write-ups document the piece and its date.

Street, Café, and Household: Everyday life around the nargile

7) John Frederick Lewis - Cairo interiors and the "pipe bearer."

Lewis spent years in Cairo sketching domestic scenes-coffee, rest, and reading-often with hookahs present. The Met's drawing Study for "The Pipe Bearer" explicitly shows a servant holding a hookah that later appears in the oil at Birmingham Museums; Tate's The Siesta shows the languor of midday rest in the same milieu.

8) Raja Ravi Varma - portraits with the huqqa in colonial India

Indian master Raja Ravi Varma drew and painted figures with huqqas -such as Man with a Hookah (1885) and the oil A Girl Holding Hookah in One Hand and Broom in Another (NGMA, New Delhi). These works place the huqqa within South Asian daily life across class lines.

9) Mughal miniatures: Nur Jahan with a huqqa on the terrace

Auction catalogs and miniatures scholarship record numerous images of elite Mughal women with huqqas. A Sotheby's catalog, for instance, describes a princess "identified as Nur Jahan, smoking a huqqa on a terrace with Delhi in the distance," c. 1740, signed Nidha Mal.

10) Qajar Iran - courtly portraits and the salon huqqa

Qajar-era portraiture in 19th-century Iran often stages rulers and nobles amid luxury objects; courtly scenes and domestic gatherings include huqqas as markers of refinement and sociability. Encyclopaedia Iranica, LACMA's Qajar-inspired photography, and museum catalogs frame the visual codes of this period.

Hookah Literature: canonical scenes you can quote

11) Carroll's Caterpillar in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

In Chapter V, "Advice from a Caterpillar," the blue Caterpillar famously sits atop a mushroom smoking a hookah, then removes it to ask Alice, "Who are you?" You can confirm this wording in standard public-domain editions.

12) Naguib Mahfouz's cafés in Midaq Alley (1947)

Mahfouz's neighborhood classic is thick with Cairene ahwa culture, tea, gossip, hashish, and water pipes. Scholarly notes and study editions point out passages of characters "sitting smoking a water pipe and sipping tea" in Kirsha's café, making the shisha a sonic and social backdrop.

13) Rudyard Kipling's verse - "sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth."

Kipling uses the hookah as an auditory/visual beat in "The Ballad of the King's Jest" (1892): "the talk slid north … with the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth." Early-period verse collections and quotation archives attribute and date the line.

14) Edward William Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836)

Lane's classic ethnography catalogs Cairene life in the 1830s, including the goza (a small Egyptian waterpipe) and the coffee-house smoking routine. Modern digitizations (Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive) preserve the chapters describing apparatus and etiquette.

Beyond the Canvas: Museums & places that conserve the culture

15) The Salar Jung Museum's "Huqqa in Art."

A curated Google Arts & Culture story from Hyderabad's Salar Jung Museum assembles historic huqqas and paintings showing their use, spanning ca. 1600–1950. It's a compact primer on materials and iconography.

16) The Met & Tate holdings — from "pipe bearers" to siestas

Institutions where you can trace these motifs in person include The Met (Lewis's Study for "The Pipe Bearer") and Tate Britain (The Siesta). Both holdings clarify how the hookah functioned as a narrative prop in Cairo-set scenes.

Cross-cultural currents: How shisha traveled and transformed

From the Persian qalyān to the Ottoman nargile to today's shisha, the waterpipe moved with court fashions and mercantile routes, settling into cafés and salons from Isfahan to Istanbul to Cairo. Museum guides and overviews of material culture help track the object's evolution in form and ritual, a story implicitly mapped by the artworks and books above.

Design details: materials, posture, and signal meanings in art

18) Glass vs. metal; bowls, stems, and small cues

Artworks often depict metal-bodied narghiles (Ottoman) in travel scenes and glass reservoirs (colored, enamel-painted) in lavish interiors. Attendant props, such as coal tongs, long hoses, and water flasks, help conservators date and locate scenes. In portraits, a sitter's relaxed posture with a shisha often signals status, leisure, or controlled sociability; in café scenes, it marks communal talk. (See museum notes and curated dossiers.)

Reading images responsibly

19) Orientalism, gaze, and context

Many 19th-century European works (Gérôme, Deutsch, Ernst, Bridgman) use the hookah as stage furniture in fantasies of Eastern leisure. Contemporary scholarship urges viewers to parse the gaze: Who is seen, who is idealized, and which details (like the hookah) are deployed to "authenticate" an exotic interior? Criticism of Orientalism and exhibition essays (e.g., on Lewis) provide a framework for a more nuanced reading.

Contemporary ripples

20) Modern exhibitions and catalog essays

Recent retrospectives and catalog essays revisit these images, mapping how artists negotiated authenticity, performance, and collecting taste in the West - often via recurring props like the shisha. Reviews of Lewis and modernist re-framings of Picasso/Delacroix keep the conversation alive.

21) Living cafés & literary tourism (Cairo, Istanbul, Algiers)

While not tied to a single "masterpiece," heritage cafés in Cairo and Istanbul still reference long traditions of nargile culture. Museum holdings (Met, Tate), national galleries (NGMA, India), and curated digital stories (Salar Jung) provide concrete waypoints for your itinerary.

FAQs — shisha in art & hookah literature

Q2. Is there a difference between hookah, shisha, nargile, and huqqa?

They're regional terms for a waterpipe. Qalyān/ghalyān (Persian), nargile/nargila (Ottoman/Turkish/Levantine), huqqa/huqqah (South Asia), shisha (Arabic and global usage).

Q3. Where in literature beyond Carroll can I "see" a hookah in action?

Mahfouz's Midaq Alley anchors shisha in Cairo's café life; Kipling's poem supplies an audible image ("sliding puffs"). Lane's 1836 ethnography describes the goza and customs in detail.

Q4. Are there museum-curated overviews of huqqas themselves (not just paintings)?

Yes, Salar Jung Museum's digital story collates historic huqqas and art; the Israel Museum lists a 19th-century miniature hookah; European pipe museums cover Ottoman nargiles.

Q5. Which modernist revisiting best shows how a single hookah motif travels across time?

Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger refracts Delacroix's harem into the 20th century; the hookah persists as a compositional anchor even as style shifts radically.

Q6. Any pitfalls when interpreting "shisha in art"?

Beware reading images as neutral reportage. In Orientalist painting, props like hookahs can "authenticate" fantasy interiors; consult exhibition texts and critical essays for context.

What these images and texts really say

Across two centuries, shisha in art and hookah literature do more than picture a smoking device. In Delacroix and Gérôme, it's a token of the imagined East; in Picasso, a modernist relic of that imagination; in Lewis and Raja Ravi Varma, it's part of lived interiors; in Mughal and Qajar works, a courtly accessory; in Carroll and Mahfouz, it's narrative rhythmlanguid and social in one case, communal and quotidian in the other. Track the cultural references to shisha closely, and you'll see how a single object connects empires, cafés, and classic pages.

Selected Works & Mentions (no links)

• Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834) - Louvre; Christie's feature (2015). Christie's

• Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Series, 1954–55), esp. Version L (hookah noted). ArtNews

• Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman with Hookah (1954, drawing). MutualArt

• Jean-Léon Gérôme, Arab Girl with Waterpipe (1873). www.wikiart.org

• Rudolf Ernst, Smoking the Hookah (late 19th c.). artrenewal.org

• Ludwig Deutsch, The Smoker (1903). Wikimedia Commons

• John Frederick Lewis, Study for "The Pipe Bearer" (The Met); The Siesta (Tate). The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Raja Ravi Varma, Man with a Hookah (1885); A Girl Holding Hookah in One Hand and Broom in Another (NGMA). Google Arts

• Mughal miniature: Princess (identified as Nur Jahan) with a huqqa, signed Nidha Mal (c. 1740) - Sotheby's. Sothebys.com

• Qajar Iran - portraits & salons (Encyclopaedia Iranica; LACMA Qajar Series note). Encyclopaedia Iranica

• Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. V ("Advice from a Caterpillar"), public-domain editions. Project Gutenberg

• Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley (1947) - scenes of waterpipe cafés. Academia

• Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of the King's Jest" (1892) - verse line on "hookah-mouth." A-Z Quotes

• Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) - goza and café customs. mirrorservice.org

• Salar Jung Museum, Huqqa in Art (curated collection highlights). Google Arts & Culture