Portrait Symbol Analysis

The portrait that Emily paints of her husband Amir, entitled After Velázquez’s Moor, symbolizes the tendency for Western people to treat Eastern cultures in a patronizing or exploitative way. Emily paints Amir in the likeness of Portrait of Juan de Pareja, the portrait that artist Diego Velázquez painted of his former slave. In Velázquez’s original, the subject is dressed to show that he’s become rich. Emily thinks that in painting Amir this way, she’s honoring his wealth and success—without realizing that she’s depicting him in a condescending way and making him uncomfortable. In modeling the portrait after Velázquez’s, she’s portraying Amir like Velázquez’s freed slave—an outsider who’s trying to assimilate into affluent white culture. The likeness between the two paintings represents the way she views Amir (and, by extension, his Muslim culture) as very different to her own white American culture, the same way Velázquez’s former slave was an outsider to European culture. She sees nothing wrong with representing Islamic culture in her own way through her art, and she pays little heed to how her depiction of Amir makes him feel belittled. In this way, the portrait embodies Orientalism, the tendency for white artists to depict non-white cultures as exotic, alien, and subtly inferior.