Collection: Orientalism & Exoticism

Orientalism in nineteenth century European painting refers to the body of work that took North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ottoman world as its subject. The category covers genuine observation made in the field, studio confections built from props and travellers' accounts, and a long tradition of European Exoticism that included Chinoiserie, Turquerie, and the later wave of Japonisme.

The movement entered French painting through Eugène Delacroix, whose 1832 journey to Morocco supplied subjects for the rest of his career. He used them to argue for colour, movement, and contemporary Romantic feeling against Davidian Neoclassicism. The next generation, working under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, professionalised the subject. Jean-Léon Gérôme built a market for high finish Orientalist scenes that were collected on both sides of the Atlantic, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau brought the same academic polish to a wider range of mythological and exotic subject matter.

British, Austrian, and American painters all developed local versions, often working through travel circuits in Egypt, Constantinople, and the Holy Land. Edward Said's 1978 study Orientalism reframed the entire body of work as a discourse about European power, and contemporary scholarship reads the paintings simultaneously as art objects and as documents of nineteenth century imperial imagination.

The prints gathered here cover engravings after Salon paintings, lithographic illustration from period travel literature, and the parallel current of Chinoiserie and Japonisme that ran from the eighteenth century through to the Belle Époque. The collection sits between the gallery's Romanticism & Classical Landscapes holdings, where Delacroix anchors the early Orientalist moment, and the Japanese Woodblock Prints selection, where the related taste for East Asian art took its most direct form.