CategoriesStyles and Movements
Orientalism
19th-century Western images of North Africa and the Middle East, mixing observation with fantasy, and the critique that later named them.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
European painters of the 19th century returned again and again to North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean, a varied region they lumped together as “the Orient”. Interest sharpened after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 and grew with the French conquest of Algeria from 1830. Eugène Delacroix filled sketchbooks on a diplomatic visit to Morocco in 1832, while Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted La Grande Odalisque (1814) without ever leaving Europe.
The pictures mix close looking with invention. Jean-Léon Gérôme rendered tiles, weapons and costume with near-photographic finish in scenes of baths, slave markets and prayer, a precision that made staged scenes seem documentary. In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argued that such images served European power, and art historians including Linda Nochlin took up the argument. The Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey, trained in Paris, turned the genre's conventions to his own ends in The Tortoise Trainer (1906).
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