Reappraising the Art of Orientalism

I n 1849, when the writer Robert Curzon finished his elegant and amusing memoir of travelling around the monasteries of the Levant, he sent it off to the publishers with a distinctly nervous and apologetic preface. "In presenting to the public yet another book of travels in the East when it is already overwhelmed with little volumes about palm trees and camels, and reflections of the pyramids,” he wrote, “I am aware that I am committing an act which requires some better excuse for so unwarrantable an intrusion on the patience of the reader than any I am able to offer..."

By the 1840s, it was no longer a novelty to arrive by steamer at Alexandria and to set off across the Egyptian desert in search of stimulation and adventure. In between the Mediterranean coast and Cairo, a Victorian gentleman was quite likely to encounter several of his friends and contemporaries making a similar journey, while the Nile itself was already becoming one of the most fashionable places to escape from the English winter, to relax, and to learn about the ancient world.

If the traveller were an amateur artist, he might sketch the sun setting over the Temple of Dendera, or the sails of a felucca against the backdrop of the obelisks of Luxor. Otherwise, he might buy some antiquities from a local tomb robber, of which there were many, or make an assembly of scarabs. On his return home, his collections could be augmented not just with objects brought back from the east by other travellers, but by images of the region painted in Europe by artists working from memory or, indeed, imagination.

By 1879, when Frederick, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) built his celebrated Arab Hall in his residence in Holland Park, he was able to acquire a large number of first-rate Ottoman Iznik tiles dating from the 1590s from dealers in London, and to choose a variety of artworks depicting life in Cairo and Damascus painted by his immediate neighbours, the pre-Raphaelites of the Holland Park Circle. Had he wished to fill his house with Chinoiserie, painted screens or Qing-era jade and bronzes and porcelain, he would have had even more choice: London was awash with luxuries that had travelled from the China Sea with as much abundance as they once did on the fabled medieval Silk Road. This was true across Europe: on his return to France from his Ottoman travels, Leighton’s contemporary Pierre Loti (1850- 1923), a former naval officer and once one of France’s most popular novelists, much admired by Proust, was able to furnish his Orientalist house in Rochefort, in provincial southwest France, with equal ease and exotic extravagance.

These days, when academics discuss the European encounter with the East, they tend to do so looking through a lens fashioned by the great Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, whose groundbreaking work, Orientalism, published in 1978, framed the study of the East by the West for two generations. Europeans, wrote Said, distorted the lands they studied by clouding their perceptions with fantasies that more accurately reflected their own desires than ground realities. They painted steamy but ultimately imaginary pictures of harems full of half-naked Circassian slave girls, something they would never have been permitted to observe, rather than the more pedestrian images of the daily life they actually encountered in the East- if, indeed, they bothered to go there at all.

It was all about power, wrote Said, and the way incoming Europeans supplanted, denigrated and culturally-appropriated what they found in the East. The Islamic aesthetic, as filtered through the eyes of Western artists was, wrote Said, dreamlike, a system of stereotypes and archetypes, rather than the reality of lived experience. In their fantasy pseudo-Islamic creations in the West, Leighton and Loti were constructing exoticised and eroticised dream worlds, theatrical tableaux against which they played out their hopes and desires.

Said was a brilliant scholar, and his work can still make us think; but it is not the whole story. He paid much more attention to how Europeans responded to non-Europeans than vice versa, and failed to notice that Orientalism was always surprisingly popular in the Orient. Every princely palace in India is full of Victorian oils of bustling bazaars and well-staffed harems; almost every hotel across the Middle East is decorated with David Roberts prints.

Even the most dedicated and otherworldly scholarship by Western historians tended to be written off by Said, and his followers, as imperialist fantasies. But it is surely simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing, and empathizing with another culture necessarily as an act of domination, rather than of understanding, respect or even catharsis. If even the attempt to understand is seen as aggression or appropriation, then all human contact soon declines into paranoia.

Some artists, such as Johan Zoffany, Val Prinsep or Eugène Delacroix, only undertook such Eastward voyages once; others became regular visitors. Others still, including George Duncan Beechey, Jacques Majorelle and Etienne Dinet, became fully assimilated into the worlds they documented, genuinely embedded in the cultures of both east and west, in some cases marrying locally and fathering children whose blood blended genes from Europe and the Middle East.

History is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures, and other parts of the world in this way, and their lives show how power and culture is rarely binary and can intersect in tangled, surprising and sometimes contradictory ways. These much-maligned Orientalist travellers and artists who moved between worlds, and engaged with foreign cultures in tangible ways, tended very often to be rebels, outcasts and misfits: the very act of setting out alone and vulnerable on the road was often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other.

As the Swiss traveller Nicolas Bouvier noted, being on the road, “deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper” reduces you, yet makes you at the same time more “open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.” “Travelling,” he writes, "Outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.” In the same way, those who choose to create or collect objects from another culture, were often changed by their travels, making their hybrid lives spaces of dialogue, transition and cross-cultural pollination between different worlds, where the emphasis is much more on convergence than the conflict perceived by Said.

While it is certainly true that some Orientalist art is the product of artists’ feverish imaginations, it is just as often a sincere attempt to recreate, sometimes in a notably reverential and studied way, the worlds and people they encountered during their travels. The images they produced show that in reality, power and culture tend not to march in lockstep, and that collecting can be an act of cross-cultural exploration, demonstrating a marked and conscious willingness to engage with other civilisations.

This certainly seems to be the view taken by the main collectors of Orientalist art today, who often tend to come from the lands depicted: for them, Orientalist paintings shine a unique documentary light on the life of their countries at a time when local artists were not practicing figurative art, and from when few photographic records survive. This is perhaps the principal reason why so many of these images are now heading ‘home’ again.

More than a century on, as this wonderful collection shows, there is no loss of appetite for these images and objects of Orientalism, in either East or West. This reminds us that we should look again at Orientalist art, and understand how much it really is part of a complex cultural dialogue, and a bridge between worlds, just like the saddle bags of the Silk Road merchants of Marco Polo’s age, filled with their spices, silks and precious ceramics from distant Cathay.

Past Auction

The Silk Road: Orientalist Paintings and Furniture from a Belgravia Residence

9 November 2023 | 2:00 PM GMT | London