I dug out a brief article about an old Orientalist paintings expo, and in the part about the historical context they funnily write down how the European painters (all men) that fantasized about the "Oriental beauties" (understand women of Algeria, Maroc, Tunisia and sometimes Egypt) were very disappointed by how they could actually never truly meet them - Delacroix being hunted down by a jealous husband the second he got too close to a woman with his sketchbook, while Matisse failed in his project to find a woman to pose for him because he kept being pushed away by protective brothers.
And it is a part of why these men ended up being forced to "dream up" and imagine a lot of what they painted, when it came to either what women looked like or the kind of social activities they had - with the only "accurate" thing they had being the architecture, precisely the facades they could not enter, the doors that remained close to them and the streets that became deserted the second they stepped into them Xp
But, given that in the end Orientalist-lovers became more infatuated with the dream and the fantasy rather than realism... The article even poking fun of how Ingres seemingly didn't mind that his Odalisc had extra-vertebrae X)
