This lecture covers art in nineteenth-century Europe in which the Near East was the subject matter (the region we call the "Middle East" today). Examining western Orientalist painting raises the question of the relationship between art and the politics of imperialism. Orientalism was a diverse and complex process by which the authority of the western Orientalist was established and in which the West defined itself through a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures. For Western artists, the East was both a real place and an imaginary space of fantasy, exoticism - an escape from western modernity. In the first half of this lecture we will focus on a range of stereotypes of the Oriental and the western Orientalist. In particular looking at Napoleonic imagery, religious scenes, stereotypes of Oriental despotism and the fantasy of the harem. When the paintings of Gerome, Delacroix, Ingres, Roberts, Lewis, Seddon and others are examined in this way, they reveal the power of the Orientalist to define and to fantasize about the Orient. At the same time western artists were travelling and painting in the East for a western market, Turkish painters were visiting Europe. In the second part of this lecture we examine painting in the court of the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople and the work of Turkish painters such as Osman Hamdy Bey. In shifting our focus to consider indigenous painters and patrons we will address the ways in which their artistic interests can be considered a strategic response that revised and contested western Orientalist stereotypes of their culture.
Gerome Harem in the Kiosk, 1881
Matisse, On the Terrace, 1912-13.
Gerome, Oedipus, 1867-8
Thomas Seddon, Arab Shaykh Richard Burton in Arab Dress. 1854
David Roberts, The Gateway to the Great Temple of Baalbec, 1841.
Holman Hunt, Bethlehem from the North 1892
William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854-60.
Delacroix, The Fanatics of Tangiers, c. 1836-8
Regnault, Execution without Judgement under the Caliphs of Granada, 1870
Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapolus, (exhibited at the Salon of 1828)
Lewis, The Hhareem 1849.
Gerome's Slave Market early 1860s
Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1832.
Lewis, The
Reception in the Hharem, 1873
Henriette Browne, The Visit, 1861.
Osman Hamdy Bey, Street Scene, 1881.
Leighton, Portions of the interior of the Grand
Mosque of Damascus, 1873-5.
Stephano
Ussi, Caravan to Mecca
Wilkie, Portrait of Mehmet Ali Pasha, 1841
Abdul Mucid
Effendi, Portrait of His Wife
