Orientalist tendencies in Western art have a long history. Oriental scenes may be found in medieval and Renaissance art, and
Islamic art has itself
had a profound and formative influence on Western artistic output. Oriental subject matter further proliferated in the 19th century, in step with Western colonialism in Africa and Asia.
Pre-19th century Mehmed II'', attr.
Gentile Bellini, 1480 Depictions of Islamic "
Moors" and "
Turks" (imprecisely named
Muslim groups of
southern Europe,
North Africa and
West Asia) can be found in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. In Biblical scenes in
Early Netherlandish painting, secondary figures, especially Romans, were given exotic costumes that distantly reflected the clothes of the
Near East. The
Three Magi in
Nativity scenes were an especial focus for this. In general art with Biblical settings would not be considered as Orientalist except where contemporary or historicist Middle Eastern detail or settings is a feature of works, as with some paintings by
Gentile Bellini and others, and a number of 19th-century works. Renaissance
Venice had a phase of particular interest in depictions of the
Ottoman Empire in painting and
prints. Gentile Bellini, who travelled to
Constantinople and painted the Sultan, and
Vittore Carpaccio were the leading painters. By then the depictions were more accurate, with men typically dressed all in white. The depiction of
Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting sometimes draws from Orientalist interest, but more often just reflects the prestige these expensive objects had in the period.
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) visited
Istanbul and painted numerous
pastels of Turkish domestic scenes; he also continued to wear Turkish attire for much of the time when he was back in Europe. The ambitious Scottish 18th-century artist
Gavin Hamilton found a solution to the problem of using modern dress, considered unheroic and inelegant, in
history painting by using Middle Eastern settings with Europeans wearing local costume, as travelers were advised to do. His huge
James Dawkins and Robert Wood Discovering the Ruins of Palmyra (1758, now Edinburgh) elevates tourism to the heroic, with the two travelers wearing what look very like
togas. Many travelers had themselves painted in exotic Eastern dress on their return, including
Lord Byron, as did many who had never left Europe, including
Madame de Pompadour. The growing French interest in exotic Oriental luxury and lack of liberty in the 18th century to some extent reflected a pointed analogy with France's own
absolute monarchy. Byron's poetry was highly influential in introducing Europe to the heady cocktail of
Romanticism in exotic Oriental settings which was to dominate 19th century Oriental art.
French Orientalism ,
The 1798 Egyptian Expedition Under the Command of Bonaparte (1835;
Musée du Louvre). ,
The Turkish Bath, 1862 by
Eugène Grasset French Orientalist painting was transformed by
Napoleon's ultimately unsuccessful
invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798–1801, which stimulated great public interest in
Egyptology, and was also recorded in subsequent years by Napoleon's court painters, especially
Antoine-Jean Gros, although the Middle Eastern campaign was not one on which he accompanied the army. Two of his most successful paintings,
Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804) and
Battle of Aboukir (1804) focus on the Emperor, as he was by then, but include many Egyptian figures, as does the less effective
Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids (1810).
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson's
The Revolt of Cairo (1810) was another large and prominent example. A well-illustrated ''Description de l'Égypte'' was published by the French Government in twenty volumes between 1809 and 1828, concentrating on
antiquities.
Eugène Delacroix's first great success,
The Massacre at Chios (1824) was painted before he visited Greece or the East, and followed his friend
Théodore Géricault's
The Raft of the Medusa in showing a recent incident in distant parts that had aroused public opinion.
Greece was still fighting for independence from the Ottomans, and was effectively as exotic as the more Near Eastern parts of the empire. Delacroix followed up with
Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827), commemorating a siege of the previous year, and
The Death of Sardanapalus, inspired by
Lord Byron, which although set in antiquity has been credited with beginning the mixture of sex, violence, lassitude and exoticism which runs through much French Orientalist painting. In 1832, Delacroix finally visited
Algeria, recently
conquered by the French, and
Morocco, as part of a diplomatic mission to the
Sultan of Morocco. He was greatly struck by what he saw, comparing the North African way of life to that of the Ancient Romans, and continued to paint subjects from his trip on his return to France. Like many later Orientalist painters, he was frustrated by the difficulty of sketching women, and many of his scenes featured
Jews or warriors on horses. However, he was apparently able to get into the women's quarters or
harem of a house to sketch what became
Women of Algiers; few later harem scenes had this claim to authenticity. When Ingres, the director of the French
Académie de peinture, painted a highly colored vision of a
hammam, he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms (who might all have been the same model). More open sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient. This imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in
Henri Matisse's orientalist semi-nudes from his Nice period, and his use of Oriental costumes and patterns. Ingres' pupil
Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) had already achieved success with his nude
The Toilette of Esther (1841,
Louvre) and equestrian portrait of
Ali-Ben-Hamet, Caliph of Constantine and Chief of the Haractas, Followed by his Escort (1846) before he first visited the East, but in later decades the
steamship made travel much easier and increasing numbers of artists traveled to the Middle East and beyond, painting a wide range of Oriental scenes. In many of these works, artists portrayed the Orient as exotic, colorful and sensual, not to say
stereotyped. Such works typically concentrated on
Arab,
Jewish, and other
Semitic cultures, as those were the ones visited by artists as France became more engaged in North Africa. French artists such as
Eugène Delacroix,
Jean-Léon Gérôme and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted many works depicting Islamic culture, often including lounging
odalisques. They stressed both lassitude and visual spectacle. Other scenes, especially in
genre painting, have been seen as either closely comparable to their equivalents set in modern-day or historical Europe, or as also reflecting an Orientalist mind-set in the Saidian sense of the term. Gérôme was the precursor, and often the master, of a number of French painters in the later part of the century whose works were often frankly salacious, frequently featuring scenes in harems, public baths and slave auctions (the last two also available with classical decor), and responsible, with others, for "the equation of Orientalism with the nude in pornographic mode": (
Gallery, below) Orientalist sculptors include
Charles Cordier.
British Orientalism , ''A Street Scene in Cairo; The Lantern-Maker's Courtship'', 1854–61 Though
British political interest in the territories of the unravelling Ottoman Empire was as intense as in France, it was mostly more discreetly exercised. The origins of British Orientalist 19th-century painting owe more to religion than military conquest or the search for plausible locations for nude women. The leading British
genre painter,
Sir David Wilkie was 55 when he travelled to
Istanbul and
Jerusalem in 1840, dying off
Gibraltar during the return voyage. Though not noted as a religious painter, Wilkie made the trip with a
Protestant agenda to reform religious painting, as he believed that: "a
Martin Luther in painting is as much called for as in theology, to sweep away the abuses by which our divine pursuit is encumbered", by which he meant traditional Christian
iconography. He hoped to find more authentic settings and decor for Biblical subjects at their original location, though his death prevented more than studies being made. Other artists including the
Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt and
David Roberts (in
The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia) had similar motivations, giving an emphasis on realism in British Orientalist art from the start. The French artist
James Tissot also used contemporary Middle Eastern landscape and decor for Biblical subjects, with little regard for historical costumes or other fittings. William Holman Hunt produced a number of major paintings of Biblical subjects drawing on his Middle Eastern travels, improvising variants of contemporary Arab costume and furnishings to avoid specifically Islamic styles, and also some landscapes and genre subjects. The biblical subjects included
The Scapegoat (1856),
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860), and
The Shadow of Death (1871).
The Miracle of the Holy Fire (1899) was intended as a picturesque satire on the local Eastern Christians, of whom, like most European visitors, Hunt took a very dim view. His ''A Street Scene in Cairo; The Lantern-Maker's Courtship'' (1854–61) is a rare contemporary narrative scene, as the young man feels his fiancé's face, which he is not allowed to see, through her veil, as a Westerner in the background beats his way up the street with his stick. This a rare intrusion of a clearly contemporary figure into an Orientalist scene; mostly they claim the picturesqueness of the historical painting so popular at the time, without the trouble of researching authentic costumes and settings. When Gérôme exhibited
For Sale; Slaves at Cairo at the
Royal Academy in London in 1871, it was "widely found offensive", partly because the British involvement in successfully suppressed the
slave trade in Egypt, but also for cruelty and "representing fleshiness for its own sake". But Rana Kabbani believes that "French Orientalist painting, as exemplified by the works of Gérôme, may appear more sensual, gaudy, gory and sexually explicit than its British counterpart, but this is a difference of style not substance ... Similar strains of fascination and repulsion convulsed their artists" Nonetheless, nudity and violence are more evident in British paintings set in the ancient world, and "the iconography of the
odalisque ... the Oriental
sex slave whose image is offered up to the viewer as freely as she herself supposedly was to her master – is almost entirely French in origin", which, with the rare examples by the classicist painter
Lord Leighton, imagine "the harem as a place of almost English domesticity, ... [where]... women's fully clothed respectability suggests a moral healthiness to go with their natural good looks".
American Orientalism ,
Arrival of a Caravan Outside the City of Morocco American Orientalism, as Edward Said noted, extended Europe's vision of the Orient, building on Anglo-French and 19th-century German scholarship. In 1842, the
American Oriental Society, the oldest learned society in the
United States, formalized this fascination, driven by scholars and missionaries with a shared interest in "Oriental literature" who studies Eastern languages and cultures. Unlike their French counterparts, who leaned into sensual and exotic depictions, American Orientalists favored expansive landscapes over genre or archaeological scenes, shaped by
New England's
Puritan values that shunned frivolous or sensuous imagery. India became a key reference in print culture, producing works such as
Jane Goodwin Austin's
The Loot of Lucknow (1868) and Lamuel Clarke Davis's
Stranded Ship (1869).
Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad (1869) further fueled fascination with the "
Bible Lands" in
Ottoman Palestine, romanticizing the East while dismissing its modern inhabitants.
Anirudra Thapa argues that the oriental imagination of India revealed a "political unconscious" underlying
manifest destiny. A notable American Orientalist painter was
Edwin Lord Weeks, who in 1883 became the first known American artist to visit the
British Raj. His paintings expressed fascination with India's
maharajas, architecture, and luxuriant material culture. The explorer
Nikolai Przhevalsky played a major role in popularising an exotic view of "the Orient" and advocating imperial expansion. "
The Five" Russian composers were prominent 19th-century Russian
composers who worked together to create a distinct
national style of classical music. One hallmark of "The Five" composers was their reliance on orientalism. Many quintessentially "Russian" works were composed in orientalist style, such as Balakirev's
Islamey, Borodin's
Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade. According to
Suzanne L. Marchand, German scholars were the "pace-setters" in oriental studies.
Robert Irwin wrote that "until the outbreak of the Second World War, German dominance of Orientalism was practically unchallenged."
Elsewhere , 1886, oil on canvas, Theodor Aman Museum,
Bucharest, Romania
Nationalist historical painting in
Central Europe and the
Balkans dwelt on oppression during the Ottoman Empire period, battles between Ottoman and Christian armies, as well as themes like the
Ottoman Imperial Harem, although the latter was a less common theme than in French depictions. The Saidian analysis has not prevented a strong revival of interest in, and collecting of, 19th century Orientalist works since the 1970s, the latter was in large part led by Middle Eastern buyers. ==Pop culture==