Orientalism

What the Word Means

Orientalism has two meanings and a reader can arrive looking for either. The older one is a category in art history: European painting, mostly nineteenth-century and mostly French and British, that took North Africa and the Middle East as its subject. The newer one comes from a book, Edward Said's Orientalism of 1978, and describes a way of representing those places rather than a style of painting them.

The two are connected, because the second was written partly about the first. What follows is about the painting, and about what the museums that own it now say regarding how far it can be trusted as a record.

A Museum Takes Its Own Definition Down

How unsettled the word has become is easiest to show with a fact rather than an argument. Tate keeps a glossary of art terms, and at the entry for Orientalist there is currently no definition. In its place the museum has posted a note: the former definition of the term was outdated and misrepresented important and factual perspectives, so the text has been temporarily removed from the website and is being reviewed and rewritten.[1]

What it replaced is still readable in the Internet Archive. The old entry said the term described the artists who travelled to the Middle East during the Victorian era in search of new and exotic subjects, and it named John Frederick Lewis, who spent thirteen years there from 1838, alongside David Roberts, William Müller, David Wilkie, William Holman Hunt and Thomas Seddon, who was in Palestine in 1854 and 1855.[2]

Read now, the difficulty is visible in the old text itself. It describes the painters and their search, and says nothing about the people they painted.

Tate has not stopped showing the work. In 2008 it mounted The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain, from 4 June to 31 August, with over a hundred and twenty paintings, prints and drawings covering British responses to the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930.[3] The museum said the exhibition offered historical and cultural perspectives on what it called the challenging questions of the Orient and its representation in British art, and that it would inevitably engage with the ongoing debates around the concept.[3]

What Opened the Door

The painting followed the politics, and the institutions say so. Histoire par l'image, published by the Réunion des musées nationaux with the French Ministry of Culture, puts the chain in one sentence: as the Ottoman Empire began its slow decline, the European powers competed in colonial ambition, France above all, through Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, the Greek war of independence and the conquest of Algeria; and as the doors of the East opened, exchanges, missions and journeys, artists' journeys in particular, multiplied and gave Orientalism a prodigious impetus.[4]

Delacroix Goes to Morocco

The best-documented journey belongs to Eugène Delacroix, born at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in 1798 and died in Paris in 1863, and its reason was political rather than artistic. In January 1832 he went to Morocco in the party of the Comte de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's envoy. The Musée national Eugène-Delacroix states why the mission was travelling: the French conquest of Algeria the previous year had given the Moroccan sultan cause for worry, and a diplomatic mission was required.[11]

He was an unlikely traveller. Before this he had left France once, to spend the summer of 1825 in England.[11] The party went from Tangier to Meknes, and he filled notebooks with what he saw.

The museum puts his reaction in its own words: he felt he had found the Orient of his dreams, and an Antiquity preserved.[11] That sentence contains the difficulty as neatly as anything written since. What he recognised was partly what he had arrived expecting.

The notes, the watercolours and the objects he brought home and kept in his studio went on to feed more than seventy paintings of Morocco across the rest of his life.[11] He was still drawing on them in 1845, when he made the squared-up study for The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in graphite on a sheet nearly sixty centimetres tall.[12]

A squared drawing is a working tool, gridded so a design can be scaled up onto canvas. It is the least romantic object imaginable, and it is the evidence that these pictures were assembled in a Paris studio from thirteen-year-old notes.

One Painting, and What Its Museum Says About It

Jean-Léon Gérôme, born at Vesoul in 1824 and died in Paris in 1904, painted Prayer in the Mosque. It is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, bequeathed by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe in 1887.[13] More than two-thirds of his output was given to Orientalist subjects.[13]

He had been to Egypt. He toured Egypt and Asia Minor from 1 January to 13 April 1868 with the writer Edmond About, the journalist Frédéric Masson, the painter Léon Bonnat and his brother-in-law Albert Goupil, an amateur photographer.[14]

The Met's own object text does the difficult part. The scene is rendered with impressive precision, it says, down to the scuffs in the red velvet garments of the man in the foreground, and that precision gives the picture a sense of authenticity. Then it says that Gérôme brought together elements which, in combination, are not accurate to any given place, time or custom. He based the interior on the ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs Mosque in Cairo, first built around 642, but he probably did not witness a service there.[13]

The museum has elsewhere given the reason. The mosque had fallen into disuse by the time of his 1868 visit, so the picture is probably a composite, assembled from sketches and photographs of several sites.[13]

That is the difficulty of Orientalist painting in one label. The detail is exact and the picture is assembled. A viewer in Paris had no way of telling which parts were which, and that was largely the point of the finish. The scholar Gerald Ackerman's observation, which the Met quotes, applies to much of the genre: these pictures were not necessarily painted or even conceived abroad, and many were executed in the studio using props brought back from the journeys.[14]

Who Went, and Who Did Not

Not every painter of the East had seen it. The Metropolitan Museum states plainly that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1780 to 1867, never travelled there, and used the harem setting to construct an erotic ideal in his odalisques.[15] It names Antoine-Jean Gros as a second painter who never made the journey.[15]

His Grande Odalisque of 1814 is in the Louvre, painted in Rome for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, shown at the Salon of 1819 and bought by the museum in 1899.[16] Le bain turc is a circular canvas just over a metre across, begun in 1859 as a rectangle, cut down to a tondo and finished in 1862, when Ingres was eighty-two.[17]

Its early ownership complicates the tidy version of this story. After the painting was found in Ingres's studio in 1864 it was bought by Khalil Bey, the Ottoman ambassador in Paris, and sold again at his sale at the Hôtel Drouot in January 1868.[17] The most famous French painting of a Turkish bath spent its first years belonging to a Turkish diplomat.

Women of Algiers, and a Question Nobody Has Settled

Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, painted in 1834, is in the Louvre, bought from the Salon in the year it was made, and hangs in the Salle Mollien of the Denon wing.[18]

Whether he saw what he painted is genuinely unresolved, and the institutions differ. The Musée national Eugène-Delacroix reports that the picture was inspired, by his own account, by a visit he was able to make inside a harem in Algiers.[19] The Metropolitan Museum's position is more sceptical and more general: male artists were probably denied entrance to actual seraglios and relied largely on hearsay and imagination.[15]

A third French institution states it as fact: Histoire par l'image says that at Algiers he was allowed into the harem of a Turkish corsair, and that the visit inspired the painting.[20] Three institutions, three positions, none of them withdrawn. What can be said is that his own account exists, that one museum reports it as his account, another repeats it as fact, and a third doubts the access generally.

The Louvre's catalogue entry for the painting carries no interpretive text at all, only the catalogue fields and a bibliography — worth saying, because any confident sentence about the picture attributed to the Louvre would have been invented.

What the Pictures Sold For

Orientalist painting was a commercial success, and the provenance records show it more precisely than any general claim could.

Prayer in the Mosque passed through the Paris dealer Goupil et Cie, who bought it on 23 September 1874 for twenty thousand francs and sold it on 5 November, six weeks later, for forty thousand to the New York dealer Knoedler. Knoedler sold it on 13 November for $10,670 to Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, who left it to the Metropolitan Museum.[13] From a Paris dealer's stockbook to an American collection took under two months.

Gérôme had made that market deliberately. From 1859 he worked with the dealer and print publisher Adolphe Goupil, and the Met notes that success in the new private marketplace freed him from state commissions and from dependence on the Salon, though he went on exhibiting there.[14]

Eugène Fromentin's Women of the Ouled Nayls, shown at the Salon of 1867, sold at the Hôtel Drouot in May 1868 for 9,400 francs and again in New York twenty years later for $6,400.[21]

The Painters Organise

The painters eventually had an institution of their own. The Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français was founded by Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of contemporary art that Bénédite treated as the antechamber of the Louvre.[22][23]

Its exhibitions ran in the centre of Paris. The second was at the Galeries Durand-Ruel from 26 February to 16 March 1895 and the fourth at the same gallery in 1897, with a retrospective of Théodore Chassériau; by 1906 the society was showing at the Grand Palais, where it continued up to 1914.

In 1907 the French government turned the villa Abd-el-Tif in Algiers into a residence for artists from mainland France, and created a prize to go with it, awarded by competition. It was set up by Bénédite with Charles Jonnart, the governor general of Algeria, and it was the Society that administered it: the winners got a stay of one to two years in Algeria. Paul Jouve and Léon Cauvy were the first residents, in 1907.[23]

The critic Arsène Alexandre had proposed the house to Jonnart in February 1906 as a sort of Villa Médicis of Algiers, after the French academy in Rome.[23] Eighty-seven artists went through it in the end.[23]

What the Genre Was For

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has kept a standing essay on Orientalism in nineteenth-century art since 2004, and it is blunt about the beginning. Some of the first nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, it says, were intended as propaganda in support of French imperialism, showing the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness or barbarism, enlightened and tamed by French rule.[15]

On the harem pictures, which are the best-known and most reproduced part of the genre, the Met is equally direct. Male artists were probably denied entry to actual seraglios, so they relied largely on hearsay and imagination, filling opulent interiors with reclining women, many of them with Western features.[15]

The same essay uses the word as an ordinary period label elsewhere — genre painting, it notes, was the prevalent form of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century.[15] Both uses sit in one text by one author, which is a fair picture of where the term now stands.

Edward Said and the Second Meaning

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and died on 24 September 2003. He began teaching at Columbia University in 1963 and became University Professor of English and Comparative Literature there in 1992.[24] He wrote most of Orientalism in 1975 and 1976 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Pantheon Books published it in New York in 1978.[25]

The book is in large part a work of literary criticism, and its subject is how a round globe came to be divided into a West and an East.[25] Said's own summary of the mechanism was that European culture was able to manage, and even to produce, the Orient.[25]

The word had described a category of painting. After 1978 it also described a habit of representation, and the argument that followed was partly about these paintings.

The Argument About the Argument

Said's book was disputed from the start, and the disagreement has never resolved. The exchange is worth setting out because it is usually reported as though only one side exists.

Bernard Lewis published The Question of Orientalism in the New York Review of Books on 24 June 1982, and he and Said exchanged replies in the same paper that August.[26][25] James Clifford argued that Said's humanist position did not sit easily with methods borrowed from Michel Foucault, who was a radical critic of humanism, and that the book relapsed into the essentialising it attacked.[25] The Syrian philosopher Sadik Jalal al-'Azm made a related criticism from another direction in 1981, arguing that Said risked essentialising the West exactly as Orientalism had essentialised the East, and coined the phrase Orientalism in reverse for the same habit practised by Arabs and Muslims about themselves.[25]

Others were broadly favourable. Talal Asad, reviewing it in 1980, wrote that its outstanding contribution was its attempt to analyse the authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse.[25] Aijaz Ahmad's Marxist critique of 1992 went the other way, opening with the statement that he disagreed with Said so fundamentally on theory and history that their understandings of the world were irreconcilable.[25]

One caution about the survey these accounts come from: it is written by a scholar sympathetic to Said, and it opens by saying the book changed the world. It reports the criticisms at length, but it is not a neutral referee.[25]

How the Museums Show It Now

The institutions that own these paintings have spent forty years working out what to say beside them, and they have not landed in the same place.

Where to See It in Paris

Ingres's Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814, hangs in the Louvre in room 702 of the Denon wing, on level 1, under the inventory number RF 1158.[16] It is one of the most reproduced paintings in the museum and among the most argued-over pictures in the category.

The Musée national Eugène-Delacroix is in the apartment and studio Delacroix moved into on 28 December 1857, on the rue de Furstemberg in the 6th arrondissement. He moved for a practical reason: his previous studio on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was too far from the church of Saint-Sulpice, where he had been commissioned in 1847 to decorate a chapel, and he was too tired to make the journey daily. A friend, the paint merchant and restorer Étienne Haro, found him the place.[31] The Saint-Sulpice murals are a ten-minute walk away.

Two Paris museums have shown the subject recently. The Institut du monde arabe gave Étienne Dinet a retrospective in 2024, Étienne Dinet, passions algériennes; Dinet was born in 1861 to a family of Paris lawyers, came upon Algeria by accident in 1884, gave up every subject outside Algeria from 1895, and settled permanently in the oasis of Bou-Saâda in 1904.[32] The Musée Marmottan Monet showed L'Orient des peintres from 7 March to 21 July 2019, with about sixty works borrowed from the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and others.[33]