Collection: Orientalism

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 movement runs from approximately 1820 to 1900, beginning with Eugène Delacroix's 1832 journey to Morocco, which supplied the early Romantic foundation, and continuing through the Salon production of the Second Empire and the Third Republic.

The academic branch was professionalised under Jean-Léon Gérôme, who built a large market for high-finish Orientalist scenes collected on both sides of the Atlantic. Théodore Chassériau, Eugène Fromentin in Algeria, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (whose La Grande Odalisque of 1814 anticipated the genre) populate the French field. The British line ran through John Frederick Lewis in Cairo and David Roberts, whose lithographed views of Egypt and the Holy Land circulated widely from the 1840s. The Austrian Orientalists Rudolf Ernst and Ludwig Deutsch worked in Paris in a hyper-realist register, while the American Frederick Arthur Bridgman and the French Étienne Dinet established themselves in Algeria.

Edward Said's 1978 study Orientalism reframed the body of work as a discourse about European power. Contemporary scholarship reads the paintings simultaneously as art objects and as documents of nineteenth-century imperial imagination.