Explorers in Art: The Middle East

The great European explorers of the Middle East are noted for their extraordinary endurance, epic journeys often involving a lifelong commitment and a habit of going native.

This fascination with the ancient world reached a high point during the Age of Enlightenment, when scholars and adventurers sought inspiration and knowledge from the ancient societies of Greece, Italy, Egypt, and the Islamic world. These explorers were not only adventurers, they also included artists who have left us with great depictions, often idealised, of life in what seemed a foreign and exotic world.

In the 19th century, they would be joined by artist explorers, whose images of the exotic and unknown world would define the image of the Orient for decades to come. Orientalism in its artistic form was in short visions of the East by artists of the West. European painters of the 19th century, from England, France, and Germany, especially, depicted what they saw in wide-eyed admiration.

Their paintings and work on paper tapped into a growing fascination with travel and far-off exotic lands, which had previously been beyond the comprehension of the average Londoner or Parisian.

The most important names of Orientalism include Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Frederic Louis, Gustave Berenfield, David Roberts, and Ludwig Deutsch.

French Orientalist painting took off with Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798, the year in which .Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was born, He was seen as the leader of the French Romantic School. He took his inspiration on the art of Rubens, the painters of the Venetian renaissance, with its emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outlined and carefully modelled form.

Dramatic and romantic content characterised his central themes and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa in search of the exotic. In 1832,Delacroix travelled to Spain and North Africa as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco, shortly after the French conquered Algeria.

He eventually produced over 100 paintings and drawings of scenes from and based on the life of people of North Africa. Delacroix was entranced by the people in their clothes. He believed that the North Africans in their attire and their attitudes provided a visual equivalent to the people of classical Rome and Greece.

The Greeks and Romans, he said, are here at my door in the Arabs who wrapped themselves in a white blanket and looked like Cato or Brutus. Delacroix managed to sketch some women secretly in Algiers, as in the painting, Women of Algiers in their Apartment. But generally, he encountered difficulty in finding Muslim women to pose for him because of Muslim rules requiring the women be covered.

Less problematic was the painting of Jewish women in North Africa and subjects for the Jewish wedding in Morocco. While in Tangier, Delacroix made many sketches of the people and city, subjects of which he would return until the end of his life. Animals, the embodiment of romantic passion, were incorporated into paintings such as Arab horses fighting in a stable, the lion hunt, nd Arab Saddling His Horse.

Orientalism, as the genre became known, has in the 21st century become to be seen as reflecting emblems of imperialism, revealing damaging narratives of racial hierarchies and cultural superiority.

According to historians, such as Edward Said, Orientalism was away of thinking adopted by Europeans the beginning of the 19th century, in which the Orient was the notional antithesis of Europe-backwards, superstitious, lascivious, and barbaric, in opposition to Europe’s modernity, rationalism, and moral rectitude.

It’s also been said these misunderstood and often inaccurate descriptions and depictions were fuelled by sexual desire and exploration in a rigid Victorian age.

This so-called warped and fantasised version of foreign countries, perceived as exotic, timeless lands, was also but less evident in the work of two British landscape painters active in the region at the time. Unlike the many Orientalist painters who took a salacious interest in the women of the Middle East, two British Orientalist painters who followed Delacroix into North Africa were more concerned with surveying the landscapes and customs of the people there.

John Frederick Lewis lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, and after his return to England in 1851, he specialised in highly detailed work, showing both realistic genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealised scenes in upperclass Egyptian interiors with little apparent Western influence.

His careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishing, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism which influenced other artists, including Gérôme, in his later works. Lewis travelled in Spain and Morocco between 1832 and 1834. The drawings he made were turned into lithographs, , and published as, sketches and drawings of the Alhambra, made during a residence in Granada in 1833.

No other English artist of the period had such a sustained period in what was then the Ottoman Empire, as Lewis did on his last trip abroad. In 1837, he left for travels that took him to Constantinople. In 1840, out to Italy and Greece. He continued to Egypt and lived in Cairo between 1841 and 1851 in a traditional upper class house that he often used as settings for his paintings.

Lewis became a member of the Royal Academy in 1865. He wrote very little, even letters. When he was required to address the water colourists as their president at a dinner, he stood up and after a while sat down again without saying a word. After being largely forgotten for decades, Lewis became extremely fashionable and expensive from the 1970s, and good works now fetch prices into the millions of dollars or pounds.

Scottish landscape artist David Roberts was in Spain and Middle East at the same time as Lewis. Roberts appears in Eastern dress in Robert Scott Lauder’s splendid portrait of him in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Inspired by Turner, he made regular expeditions abroad. His carefully composed atmospheric paintings convey both the excitement of experiencing picturesque and exotic sites with fascinating details.

Roberts travelled to Egypt in 1838, and from that journey, produced works that were collected in an illustrated book tha tbecame celebrated in mid-Victorian Britain. His book, Sketches in Egypt & Nubia, from which lithographs were produced, delighted Queen Victoria. But despite the exotic images, travel in this part of the world was still dangerous. In the Muslim world, images were seen as forbidden subjects.

 

Government diplomats and agents from England and France were already active in the region, competing for influence and helping themselves to treasures such as the friezes of the Parthenon in Athens, where the French had been active in pillaging as had Britain’s Lord Elgin.

Robert’s appointment as a Commissioner of the Great Exhibition of 1851, under the patronage of Prince Albert, confirmed his status. Egyptomania, the fascination with all things ancient Egyptian, gradually took possession of Victorian Britain’s minds. The Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt between 1798 and 1801 had started a process whereby its treasures were studied and exported to Europe. Museums across the continent were filled with archaeological remains, freshly excavated from the desert.

With the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in the early part of the century, the understanding of Ancient Egypt grew exponentially.As a result, the ability to read ancient manuscripts and decoration covering Egyptian monuments, the foundations of Egyptology as a science were laid. By the century’s end, the design features and styles of this historical Egypt had become a visible part of Victorian art, public and domestic life, and popular culture.

The great exhibition of the works of all nations was the creation of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. Housed inside an innovative and spectacular glass construction in the heart of London, it was a showcase of design, technology, and culture, bringing all the nations of the world together under one roof.Among a bewildering variety of over 100,000 other displays, visitors could gaze in wonder upon giant statues showing the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II. These were copies of two figures at the entrance to the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt.

Later, when the exhibition building was moved to another London location, an elaborate Egyptian court was created, complete with standing figures copied from the originals. The erection of obelisks, inspired by the wonders of Ancient Egypt, was not only popular in European cities, where many were actually originals transported from their homeland. In Washington, D.C., theWashington Monument became the world’s biggest and most famous obelisk.

It was in the same year, 1856, that French artist, Jean-Léon Gérôme, visited Egypt for the first time. Despite his embellished work in North Africa, Gérôme was best known for his work, The Execution of Marshal Ney, a marshal in Napoleon’s army, a heroic figure called the Bravest of the Brave by Napoleon. When Napoleon abdicated in 1814, Ney pledged his allegiance to the Bourbon monarchy. But when Napoleon returned to France, Ney rejoined his former leader. When the monarchy was restored in 1815, Ney was accused of plotting Napoleon’s return and charged with treason. At his execution, he refused to wear a blindfold and was allowed to give the order to fire.

Gérôme’s North African itinerary followed the now classic GrandTour of the Middle East, up the Nile to Cairo, and then to Abu Simbel, then back to Cairo, across the Sinai, and back. This heralded the start of many more Orientalist paintings depicting Arab religious practice, genre scenes, and North African landscapes.

Gérôme was one of the first Orientalist painters in the 19th century to paint at the dawn of the photographic age. As well as travelling in the region, he used photos as references for his paintings.

Among these paintings in which the Oriental setting is combined with depictions of female nudity, The Slave Market, The Large Pool of Bursa Pool in a Harem, and similar subjects were works of imagination, in which Gérôme combined accurately observed Middle Eastern architectural details with idealized nudes painted inhis Paris studio.

In 2019, a right-wing German populist German party, Alternative for Germany, used The Slave Market in a campaign poster in the 2019 Europe parliament elections. European depiction of the harem was almost perpetually dependent on the Oriental myth.European male artists were unable to obtain access to the harem,and so relied upon visits to brothels in their own imagination to conjure an erotic fantasy image of the space.

Research has shown that even first-hand accounts by female artists and writers who had the opportunity to enter local harems were slightly embellished.

Western fascination with sexual practices in the Middle East and North Africa extended to the same-sex relationships, controversially investigated first-hand by the explorer Richard Burton.

Leighton House in Holland Park, London, was the London home of Frederic Leighton, a leading Victorian artist, Orientalist, and collector. Its unique architecture, including Leighton’s studio, the Arab Hall and huge garden are now a museum dedicated to Leighton’s life, his art and his collections. Leighton’s grandfather was a physician to the Russian Czars and rewarded with a sizeable fortune. Urbane, cosmopolitan and speaking five languages,Leighton had a private income and travelled for much of his life developing a love of the Middle East and North Africa in particular where he spent long periods.

Leighton was knighted when he became president of the Royal Academy in 1878, a position he held for almost 20 years. One of Leighton’s most famous portraits was of the celebrated explorer Richard Burton, now hanging in London’s National Portrait Gallery. It was Burton who helped Leighton source tiles from across the Middle East and North Africa, particularly from Damascus. The tiles were set in the Arab Hall, especially constructed for the purpose. Leighton was given a peerage in 1895,a month before his death at his home. His coffin lay in the housebefore his burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He remains the only occupant of Leighton house, a unique home he created from a vacant block over half a century, which remains nearly 150 years later a memorial, a palace of art, and a celebration of a fascinating artistic journey.

The artistic fascination with the Orient stretched to places likeTangier in Morocco, which became an international city at the end of the 19th century.

The Scottish artist, James McBey, who produced prints and drawings of Moroccan life echoing the work of Lewis , his fellow Scott Roberts, and even Delacroix, who was here 50 years earlier.McBey famously painted the portrait of T. E. Lawrence now hanging in the Imperial War Museum.

Lawrence was perhaps the ultimate Western Orientalist, explorer, empire builder, and artist, an image honed in war in the desert of Palestine in World War I.

Lawrence published his own semi-autobiographical and critically acclaimed account of his war in his epic novel, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which made him famous and inspired the equally epic Oscar-winning film, Lawrence of Arabia. An advertisement for the1935 edition quotes Winston Churchill as saying, “It ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language. As a narrative of war and adventure, it is unsurpassable.” In the art world, orientalism kicked on emerging into the modernist age as artists such as Henri Matisse headed here in search of light and colour, at the same time embracing familiar Orientalist themes.

Matisse stayed in Tangier in a rented room at the the Villa de France, overlooking St Andrew’s Church, and painted it in 1912. The nightlife and colours he experienced here which stayed with Matisse influenced his vibrant works for the next half-century.

More recently, the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, inspired too by the vivid colours which so influenced his designs, brought homes here. They included this one in the Tangier casbah, now a hotel, it showcases so much about Moorish architecture and design, which so attracted Europeans across the ages. Tangier’s tangled history tells the story of so much of the Near East, fought over for centuries.

It’s a common story across the North Africa and the Middle East, a region of intense conflict and fascination for hundreds of years,embroiled in culture wars that remain to this day.

 

Destinations: Middle East and North Africa / England / Scotland / France / Germany / Switzerland