Political correctness overshadows a fine collection of 19th-century paintings of the Middle East
The first and greatest age of Orientalism in the visual arts started in France around the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and peaked as the Romantic Movement swept through Europe.
Works like Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and The Fanatics of Tangier (1838) set precedents for later depictions of the East as a place given to sexual excess, wanton cruelty, mass murder and unbridled sensuality.
But as Tate Britain's The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting makes clear, on this side of the Channel the story was very different.
From the 17th century onwards, British artists were happy to paint portraits of eccentric fellow countrymen and women who liked to dress up in oriental costume, but they didn't actually begin to visit the Middle East until the late 1830s.
At the start of the period, a few exhibited sensationalist subject pictures, such as William Allan's Slave Market, Constantinople of 1838. Later, John Frederick Lewis would occasionally titillate the Victorian public with scenes purportedly showing scantily clad young women being introduced into the harem.
By and large, though, what is remarkable about the work in this show is how clear-sighted the British artistic response to the Arab world was. Unlike their French counterparts, the British did not generally impose their lurid fantasies on Eastern subject matter. You won't find a single British painting at Tate Britain showing a massacre, a beheading or a naked slave girl.
Instead, you'll find descriptive and topographical paintings of a very high order, and David Roberts, Frederick Leighton and Edward Lear are all supremely accomplished artists. However, too often their Eastern landscapes and views of mosques and churches are more accurate than inspired.
By the end of the show, I felt as though I were turning the pages of an album filled with snapshots from other people's holidays. Individual British Orientalist paintings may be exquisite, but the genre as a whole is repetitive and dull. I'll take the full-blooded French Romanticism any day....
Read entire article at Richard Dorment in the Telegraph (UK)
Works like Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and The Fanatics of Tangier (1838) set precedents for later depictions of the East as a place given to sexual excess, wanton cruelty, mass murder and unbridled sensuality.
But as Tate Britain's The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting makes clear, on this side of the Channel the story was very different.
From the 17th century onwards, British artists were happy to paint portraits of eccentric fellow countrymen and women who liked to dress up in oriental costume, but they didn't actually begin to visit the Middle East until the late 1830s.
At the start of the period, a few exhibited sensationalist subject pictures, such as William Allan's Slave Market, Constantinople of 1838. Later, John Frederick Lewis would occasionally titillate the Victorian public with scenes purportedly showing scantily clad young women being introduced into the harem.
By and large, though, what is remarkable about the work in this show is how clear-sighted the British artistic response to the Arab world was. Unlike their French counterparts, the British did not generally impose their lurid fantasies on Eastern subject matter. You won't find a single British painting at Tate Britain showing a massacre, a beheading or a naked slave girl.
Instead, you'll find descriptive and topographical paintings of a very high order, and David Roberts, Frederick Leighton and Edward Lear are all supremely accomplished artists. However, too often their Eastern landscapes and views of mosques and churches are more accurate than inspired.
By the end of the show, I felt as though I were turning the pages of an album filled with snapshots from other people's holidays. Individual British Orientalist paintings may be exquisite, but the genre as a whole is repetitive and dull. I'll take the full-blooded French Romanticism any day....