Orientalism

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.