Orientalism

To view our Orientalist paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series.

Orientalism was the nineteenth-century European fascination with North Africa and the Near East, which produced a whole school of painting devoted to their light, architecture, markets and daily life. Born of Romantic travel and colonial expansion, it gave the Salon some of its most luminous and richly detailed canvases.

Origins: The Lure of the East

Orientalism grew out of Romanticism's taste for the exotic, given new impetus by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and France's expansion into North Africa. From the 1830s, painters traveled to Morocco, Algeria, Egypt and the Levant, or worked from studio props and imagination, to depict a world of dazzling light, tiled interiors, bazaars and desert horizons.

Three ages of Orientalism: Romantic beginnings (1830-1850), from Delacroix's Morocco to the first Salon successes; the great age (1850-1880), when travel and empire filled the Salon with the light of the South; and late Orientalism (1880 onward), as the school spread across Europe and endured into the new century.

Light, Detail and the Exotic

At its heart, Orientalism was a painting of light and detail: the white heat of the desert, the cool shadow of a tiled courtyard, the color of carpets, robes and copper. Its subjects ranged from the grand, mosques, caravans, cavalrymen, to the intimate, a market stall, a group of women, a portrait in local dress. Whether painted from life or invented in a Paris studio, these works carried an appetite for the picturesque that European collectors have never lost.

Legacy

Orientalist painting remains one of the most collectible nineteenth-century genres, prized for its color, craftsmanship and evocative subjects. Its finest canvases hang in major museums, and its wider school offers collectors an entire world of light and incident.

Timeline by GalerieClub Fine Art.