19th century
Orientalism
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.
Schools of the 1800s
Orientalist Paintings in Our Collection
Oasis Gorge at SunsetMore from this school
Where a canvas stands in relation to the painter whose name it carries is set out in our guide to reading attribution on an antique painting.
- 1798 Napoleon's Egyptian campaign
- 1832 Delacroix travels to Morocco
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 travelled 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.
- 1834 Delacroix's Women of Algiers
- 1850s Gérôme's ethnographic Orient
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 colour 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.
- 1893 A society of its own
A School of Its Own
By the end of the century the subject had its own society, the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, founded in 1893, and its own Salon. Orientalist painting remains one of the most collectible nineteenth-century genres, prized for its colour, craftsmanship and evocative subjects. Its finest canvases hang in major museums, and its wider school offers an entire world of light and incident.
Delacroix drew Morocco in secret.
In 1832 he joined a French diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco and spent about six months in North Africa. Figurative images were widely prohibited and the French presence was tense, so many of his sketches were made surreptitiously. He filled at least seven notebooks and kept them for the rest of his life. Fifty-four of those sheets are now in New York, at the Morgan Library.
Orientalism
Who Trained Our Painters
Our painters in this tradition, and the studios where they learned.
Trained byHorace Vernet
More painters of this tradition
GalerieClub Fine Art
1,100+
paintings sold since 2017
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