262 zyxwvutsrq

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ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART*
One of the more interesting developments in the history of art over
the past decade has been the rediscovery of pictorial orientalism, the
use of Middle Eastern imagery by Western artists for a variety of ends

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and purposes. One reason for the scholarly interest is economic.
Orientalist paintings which once would have been dismissed as the
worst sort of academic trash have suddenly found an appeal in the
marketplace not totally unrelated to the concentration of buying power
in the hands of the descendants of the purported subjects of these
paintings themselves.’ At the same time, orientalist works of art, which
have constituted a major aspect of the history of Western art from the
fifteenth century onward, have in recent times been subject to intense
scrutiny because of their role in the creation of cultural stereotyping.
One result of this scrutiny has been an outpouring of indignation from
critics who have suddenly discovered in many orientalist works of art
themes of intolerance; racial, sexual and cultural prejudice; and the
subtle manipulation of images for political purposes? And yet if we
look over the history of representations of ”foreign” cultures in the
history of art-in the history of any art, Western or non-Western-
suchindignation must strike us as more than a little naive. For there is
certainly nothing astonishing or novel about the fact that people
outside of a given culture or group have been regarded by members of
that group as being, at best, funny-looking and uncultured, and at
worst, ugly and malignant. The Turkish artist (possibly a retired naval
officer named Haydar Reis, nicknamed Haydari), who painted a

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*In preparing this paper for publication, the author has reduced the number of

illustrations.
’
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illustrations from the original 39 pairs of slides. He is indebted to Yvonne Haddad for
suggesting the topic, and to Edwin Binney, 3rd, who aided in the obtaining of the

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The practice of holding speciality sales on orientalist works appears to have started in
London during the week of 12 April 1976, at the time of the World of Islam Festival,
when Sotheby’s instituted an “Islamic Week” whose sales included Eighteenth,
Nineteenth. and Twentieth Century Paintings, Watercolours, Rints. and photographs of
Islamic Interest by European Artists (Wednesday, April 14). See also the similar
Sotheby’s sale of 4 May 1977, and the Hotel Drouot sale Le Colonel F. Colomban et
Autres Voyageurs de 1’0rient du X I F au &but du X X sikcle (Pans: Nouveau Drouot,
19 June 1981).

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* The impetus for this reappraisal of orientalism in art stems from the well-known
work Orientalism by Edward W . Said (New York: Pantheon, 1978), in which the matter
of the visual arts is not treated in any detail, but the outlines for a basis of criticism are
established.
’ See Turkish Treasuresfrom the Collection of Edwin Einney, 3rd, by Edwin Binney.
3rd (Portland, Oregon: Portland Art Museum, 1979), entry 12, pp. 24-25.
 zyxw
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ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART

portrait of Francis 1 of France in the style of Clouet (Figure I ) not

only had trouble with the strange threequarter profile present in the
263

engraving from which he copied his “portrait,” but he was struck as

were many who knew the king of France, by the unusual size and
shape of that monarch’s prodigious proboscis. At roughly the same
time, Peter Merecinus, a European artist, produced an engraving
purporting to be a portrait of Suleyman 1, Sultan of Turkey (Figure 2),
in which we can see similar elements of caricature, especially in the
large turban! There is nothing unusual about this sort of thing; one
has only to look a t the editorial cartoons in French or German
newspapers between 1914 and 1918, or at today’s American newspapers
when the cartoonist chooses to portray an Arab subject, to find out
that ignorant national stereotyping is one of the oldest most persistent
indoor sports in any culture?
We should also expect, somewhat cynically to be sure, that in the
normal run of things, strangeness in another culture leads almost
automatically to intolerance, which in turn leads to fear, hatred, and
the impugning of the “furriner’s’’ morals. In an early nineteenth-
century Turkish manuscript of a work known as the Zenan-nameh, for
example, we find a picture of a European lady of degree (Figure 3).
Reading the text, we discover that she is of loose morals, while “her
belly is a place for Muslims to throw their offal.’%Nicolas de Nicolay’s

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sixteenth-century account of his travels in Turkey features a Louis
Danet engraving of a Turkish woman (Figure 4) going to a public
bath; the commentary reflects contemporary European attitudes
toward three despised things, baths, women, and Turks:
Among the women . . . there is great amity proceeding from the
resort to baths; they become fervently in love the one of the other
, . . and will not cease until they have found the means to bathe

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with them & to handle and grope them, so full are they of
feminine . . . wantonness.’

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Reproduced here from the frontispiece of Solymun the Magnificent Going to
Mosque, privately printed for Sir William Stirling Maxwell, Florence and Edinburgh,
1877.
See, for example, Edward W. Said, Cowring Ishm: How the Media and the Experts
Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York Pantheon, 1981).
Binney, Turkish Treasures. entry 79a, pp. 124-25.
’ An English translation of Nicolay’s work, entitled The Nuvigorions into Turkie. was
published in London in 1585, and was reprinted in reduced facsimile by Da Capo Press,
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd. (New York and Amsterdam, 1968). Our quotation is
adapted from the text of Book 2, folio 60 recto. referring to the illustration of folio 61
recto. Our illustration is taken from a copy of the second Italian edition of 1580,
 264 zyxwv
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THE MUSLIM WORLD

No wonder, then, that in this marvelous atmosphere of ignorance

coupled with religious and cultural intolerance, cultural stereotyping of
the most negative sort has flourished for centuries. But the picture of
the perception of the Islamic world in the eyes of Western artists is
much more complex than this simple pattern of attributing loose
morals and low culture to the stranger. For looking a t the East is an
almost obsessive theme in Western art, literature, political thought,
and performing arts for over half a millenium-indeed in one form or
another it has existed for over a thousand years. It is a consistent
theme in Western civilization, and an integral part of that civilization?
The subject of our short essay, then, will be to go beyond the simple

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discovery that people, even people with impressive university degrees,
are often ignorant and intolerant about each other. Rather, in
analyzing some basic themes in Western views of the East we will
attempt to take a tripartite view of the realm of the visual arts, whether

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in and of themselves, or as the handmaidens of history, literature,
dance, theater, and political and religious propaganda.
A few observations seem in order. One of the first things that strikes
us, especially if we look in the rare book rooms of major libraries, is the
large volume of early publication on the subject of the Mysterious
Middle East, due in part to the popularity of travel narratives in
general in European civilization, and in part to the manner in which
the subjects of these narratives lent themselves to interesting illustra-
tions. The political/ religious conflicts between East and West-which
a t the time of the invention of moveable type and the emergence of the
woodcut and engraving as major means of communication in Europe
were focused primarily upon the Ottoman Turks and their conquests in
the Balkans, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean-led to a
widespread anxiety in European civilization prompted by what was

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referred to as Tu'rkengefahr.9 The Turkish danger led in the realms of

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published by Francesco ZiIetti in Venice, now in the collection of Edwin Binney, 3rd.
The French original was published in Anvers in 1576, with engravings by the
Fontainebleau master Louis Danet, thought to be after drawings by Nicolay himself.
* See, for example, A. St.-Clair, The Image of the Turk in Europe (New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973); D.A. Rosenthal, Orientalism (Rochester, N Y
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1982); J. Alazard, L'Orienr er lo
pehturejrancaise au X I X S i k h (Paris: Pion, 1930); D. Metlitzki, m e Matter of Araby
in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and N. Daniel, f i e
Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1975).
See R. Schwoebel, The Shaa'ow of the Crescent: The Renairsonce Image of the Turk
(Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1967); P. Coles. The Otroman Impact on Europe (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1968); and E. Eickhoff, Venedig, Wien, und die Osmanen (Munich
Callwey, 1970).
 zyxw
ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART 265

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art to the emergence of unusual imagery. For example, Turkish
warriors formed a common element in the decoration of popular tin-

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glazed Italian maiolica ceramics; the atrocities allegedly committed by
Turks against Europeans led to the emergence in Germany of a whole
genre of popular literature Flugschriften. When the Islamic menace
was at its height and the Turk was established in such diverse places as
Toulon and Otranto, the Sultan was equated with the Antichrist, and
European artists used the turban to identify all sorts of personae non
grutae in religious paintings, from a turbaned Herod who orders the
massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem, to turbaned Jews who
surround the cross at the Passion of Christ.10
As the political fortunes of Islam in Europe waned, especially after
the second siege of Vienna in 1683 and the subsequent Habsburg
Drang nach Siid-osten under Prince Eugene of Savoy, a remarkable
change came about in the European image of the Turk. The “Grand
Turk” became instead the “Sick Man of Europe” and the practices ahd
personnages of Islamic civilization became the subject of ridicule,
either in popular broadsheets or in the court ballet and theater of the
time. In the works of Marlowe and Racine, the Turk could be cast in
the role of tragic hero, but as early as 1626 in the French court a scene
in the Grand bal de la douairi‘ere de Billenbahaut featured an “entrke
de Mahomet et ses docteurs” casting the Prophet in a ridiculous role.”
Nineteenth-century liberalism in Europe, coupled with neo-classicism
and philhellenism, merely intensified these themes, giving them a new
and sharper political edge. The most effective user of this imagery was
Eugkne Delacroix, whose paintings on the subject of the Greek war of
independence cast the Greeks as the “heroes” and the Ottoman Turks
as the “heavies.” Even this intensity eventually dissolved, however, into
romantic and sentimental imagery. Delacroix in his later years turned
more frequently to exoticism and the oriental for his subjects, as the
Orient became a sort of screen upon which sublimated European
notions of sensuality and sexuality were often projected with vivid
colors.’* As more and more European travellers, missionaries, and zyxw
zyxwvu
lo The Islamic Herod may be seen in Matteo di Giovanni’s “Massacre of the
Innocents” in St. Agostino, Siena, of the later fifteenth century; Diirer’s engraved
Passion series of 1512 shows numerous images of turbaned Jews. See W.L. Strauss, ed.,
The Complete Engravings, Etchings, t Drypoints of AIbrecbf Diirer (New York: Dover,
1972), entries 59, 60,61, 62 and 63.
See the important work by C.D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought,
and Literoture (Paris: Boivin, 1938), pp. 630-35, where Rouillard quotes in extenso from
the 1626 text.
see the class work by W. Friedlaender, From David ro Delacroix (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 114-18.
 zyxwvuts
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266 THE MUSLIM WORLD

imperialists moved to the Orient, the later nineteenth century saw the
development of a popular romantic notion of the Middle East which
until 1948 remained uppermost in the European mind, a Middle East
of popular music and exotic imagery (Figure 5 ) which continually
beckoned to Europeans, and whose costumes seem to have exercised
an irresistable fascination not only for painters but for travellers,
missionaries, and imperialists themselves, who from Mary Wortley
Montagu to T.E. Lawrence were’continually putting them 0n.I3
The types of oriental imagery to be discussed here necessitate our
cutting the pie of orientalist art into three large wedges. ”Rapportage
Orientalism” was at least in theory motivated by the notion that
imagery of the Middle East should be accurate and should depict
things which actually existed in fact. “Political Orientalism used the
Orient and its imagery in the service of a religious or political message
of some sort, generally anti-Islamic. “Exoticism” used the Orient as an
excuse to portray subjects and to elicit emotions which until the time
of Courbet and Manet could not be properly conveyed with images of
the “girl next door” type. Interestingly enough, none of these three
categories was confined to a particular stylistic school in the history of
European painting. For example, in all of the bickering and ideological
struggle between the Classicism of Ingres and the Romanticism of

zyxwvutsrq
Delacroix, painters of both schools indulged in all three categories of
orientalist painting imagery.

Rapportage Orientalism

Rapportage-the recording of events with accuracy as an objective-

is an element in European orientalist painting which developed parallel
to the publication of travel accounts, and many of its earliest examples
occur either as illustrations to travel accounts, or extrapolations from
travel accounts added to paintings in order to give them ‘‘authenticity’’
or “local color.” The paintings and prints using oriental subjects
attributed to Gentile Bellini, Costanza da Ferrara, Melchior Lorichs,

zyxwvutsrqponmlkjih
l 3 The theme of Europeans wearing Islamic dress is an all-pervasive one, extending
over the centuries in Europe and eventually in the United States. The famous scene of
Lawrence trying on his Arab clothing, from the David Lean film Lcnvrence ofArabia, is
undoubtedly familiar to many readers, but the type of individual who not only donned
Arab apparel but had a formal portrait painted while so clothed varied from Markgraf
Ludwig (“Tiirkenlouis”)of Baden-Baden, to Mary Wortley Montap, to the American
traveler and painter James Wells Champney, whose self-portrait in a turban hangs at
Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts.
 zyxw
ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART 267

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and others who were among the earliest European artists actually to
travel in the Near East, are generally distinguished by a concern for
accuracy.14 In the engravings of Louis Danet, whose sources may have
been drawings executed in situ,we can see details of costume, of fabric
design, weaponry, and physiognomy which show a remarkable
attention to detail (Figure 6). The highly specific paintings of
Delacroix, developed from his notes and watercolor sketches made in
situ during his trips to North Africa, while employing the characteristic
broad brushstroke of the Romantic style, nevertheless show the same
concern for careful and competent rapportage, in marked contrast to
the more generalized conceptions of oriental peoples and facial types
which fascinated artists such as Rembrandt two centuries ear1ier.l5 But
even in as blatant an example of stem-winding exoticism as the
painting by lngres entitled "Odalisque with a Slave" (Figure 7), we find
the element of rapportage present in the extremely detailed and
accurate rendition of the various objects scattered about the scene,
even though these objects are highly inappropriate to the interior of a
real harem, and also incongruous in style and date.Ih
The most important of the early published travels to Turkey were
profusely illustrated, and certain artists published suites of prints
dealing with the Islamic East. Among these were the series done by the
Flemish artist Peter Coeck van Aelst,I7 the German/ Danish Melchior
Lorichs,lx the anonymous artist who illustrated the account of
Salomon Schweigger,Ig and the German Erhard Reuwich, who

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illustrated the account by Bernard von Breydenbach.20 The subjects

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I' The question of the accuracy of early paintings made by European artists who either

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visited the Near East or who obtained glimpses of the Orient in Venice, is dealt with in
the masterful new study by Julian Raby of Oxford University, Venice, f i r e r and the
Orienrul Mode (London: Islamic Art Publications, 1982).

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Is Cf. H. Schmidt, "Rembrandt, der islamixhe Orient und die Antike" in Aus der Welr
der islomischen Kunst: Festschrifr f i . E m f Kihnel (Berlin: MaM, 1959), pp. 336-49.
l6 The masculine tuj helmet to the left is entirely out of place; the slave's headwear is
eighteenth-century Ottoman, her shulvur or pantaloons are Indian, the background
architecture is Cairene, and the drapes are European velvet.
See St.-Clair, The Image ofthe Turk. entries 4 and 5 ; also the facsimile of the entire
series in 7he Turks in MDXXXIII. privately printed for Sir William Stirling Maxwell
(London and Edinburgh, 1873).
'ISee St.-Clair, The h u g e ofthe Turk, entries 6-10; other illustrations from Lorichs's

several groups of prints, including his architectural woodcuts from Wohlgerissene und
geschnittene Figuren sumt turkische Gebuuden (1570), may be seen in E. Oberhummer,
Konstantinopl unter Sultun Suleimun dem Grossen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1902).
l9 Salomon Schweigger's Konsrantinopel und Jerusulem of 1608 has been reproduced
in reduced size, with a new Introduction by R. Neck, by Akademische Druck- u.
Verlagsanstalt of Graz, in 1964.
XJ See St.-Clair, The Image of the Turk, entry 1 .
268 zyxwvut
zyxwvuts THE MUSLIM WORLD

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covered by these artist-rapporteurs were those we might naturally
expect to be of the greatest interest to prospective readers. There was
an interest in political figures, especially the rulers of the Ottoman and
Persian empires, known respectively as the ”Grand Turk” and the
“Great Sufi.” There was a particular interest in religious practice
sometimes tempered with intolerance to be sure, but generally quite
straight-forward. Depictions of the attitudes of Muslim prayer (Figure
8) and of all the ceremonies and processions of day-today religious
life, are quite common in the early travel accounts, and they are also
generally quite accurate. Heterodox religious practice, and especially
the purported activities of the more picturesque of the various dervish
orders such as the Mevlevis or “whirling dervishes,’’ also formed a part
of early orientalist depictions, and some of the more extensive costume
books form a virtual catalogue of obscure heterodox religious practice
in the Ottoman Empire. Festivities of all sorts again fascinated the
early European travelers, and the depictions in their works of
weddings, circumcisions, and various Muslim holiday celebrations
show an often astonishing similarity to the same events as they can be
witnessed today around the Middle East.21 The aspects of social life
which most fascinated Europeans of course were those associated with
women. The themes of the veiling of women, the seclusion of women,
and institutions such as public baths reserved for women, were all
subjects of the rapporteur’s artistic efforts, all the more intriguing
because they were in theory forbidden to be seen by men and especially
by foreign men. In general, it is possible to applaud for their accuracy
many of the early travel-related images connected with this aspect of
Islamic civilization seen as the most provocative and problematic one.
In fact, one can see in perhaps the most famous later example of
alleged “rapportage” about women, Ingres’s great exotic “Turkish Bath”
tondo of 1862, 22 not only the taking of almost indecent liberties with
the subject (the allusions to lesbianism, the pretextual nature of its

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eroticism), but also the reliance on two of the most accurate and dis-

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passionate rapporteurs. The inspiration for the painting comes directly
from the eighteenth-century letters of Mary Wortley Montagu,23 while

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21 A village circumcision fete is depicted by Coeck; Schweigger shows a “Beschneidung”

procession after p. 190, a “Hochzeit” after p. 206, and a Turkish funeral on p. 200.
22 Paris, Mu& du Louvre.

23 See R. Halsband, ed., The Complete Letters of Mary Wortley Montugu. I (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), 312-14. In this letter, written in April of 1717, Lady Mary gives
a detailed description of the women’s bath in Adrianople (Edirne); in marked contrast to
Ingres’s painting, however, is her description of the women in the bath: “there was not
the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst ’em.”
 ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART 269

one of the figures in the background was lifted directly from a Louis
Danet illustration of Nicolay’s sixteenth-century best-seller.24
Artists became involved in scientific rapportage of various types;
Reuwich made a woodcut of the Arabic alphabet for Breydenbach, and
Schweigger took pains to reproduce in his work a transcription of
some Turkish music for the edification of his reader^?^ Discussions of
medicinal plants, of architectural methods, and even of the types and
varieties of tents, were all mentioned in travel accounts and
meticulously depicted by artists. Certainly the scientific side of
European rapportage, which from the time of Rauwolf26 represents a
major trend in European orientalism, reached its peak around the time
of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, when shiploads of scholars of all
sorts followed in the wake of the conquering French armies. And of all

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of the rapporteurs, one of the most scientific is Delacroix, who with his
sketchbook water-colors of fauna, flora, costumes, landscapes, houses,
and the panoply of daily and ceremonial life, shows himself to be the

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committed observer par excellence. What a contrast is to be observed
between these scientific observations and the famous canvases which
made his r e p ~ t a t i o n ! ~ ~

Political Orientalism

As we mentioned at the outset, we should not be surprised to find

intolerance in images of foreigners, especially when great cultural,
social, religious, and political differences exist among groups of
peoples. Here again, however, there is a curious mixture of politics
with both rapportage and exoticism in many of the most political
works of art. Those of Delacroix are of course the very best-known-
works such as the “Massacre at Chios” (1824), “Greece Expiring on the
Ruins of Mesolonghi” (1826), and his paintings inspired by Byron’s

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philhellenic romance f i e Giaour and the Pasha.28 In past times as in
the present, however, it was left to the slightly less exalted realm of

zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgf
St.-Clair, The Image of the Turk, entry 1 I .
25 Schweigger, Komtantinopel und Jerusalem, p. 209.
26 See Karl H. Dannenfeldt, Leonhurd Rauwo&
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24 See our Figure 4; the engraving from the first French edition is reproduced by

Sixteenth-century Physician.
Botanist, and Traveler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).
27 Reproductions of the North African water-colors are reproduced in many places,

among them C. Roger-Marx and S. Cot&, Delacroix (New York: Braziller, 1971).
** See, for example, the painting in the Fogg Art Museum (1943.233, bequest of
Grenville Winthrop).
270 zyxwv
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political cartooning (Figure 9) to make the most blatantly anti-Islamic
political statements, while in the realm of painting the political edge
was often dulled by the irresistable veneer of exoticism. Still, the
enemy was the enemy. The theme of cruelty, always ascribed to one’s
political enemies in any period or culture, shows in the wall paintings
of Czcstochowa, where in the great Jasna G6ra monastery we see vivid
depictions of the sufferings of pious monks under the cruel onslaught
of the Turks (Figure Popular fiction from Washington Irving’s
The Alhambra to Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights
played up the picturesque cruelty of Islam at a t h e when the West still
buried the mentally ill in foul dungeons and hanged lower-class
criminals for trivial crimes; but then again the essential nexus of
politics, whatever else may have changed over the centuries, is to
emphasize one’s rival’s failings while excusing one’s own.

Exoticism

The author of this paper recalls quite vividly an episode in his own
career some years ago, when he was delivering a lecture on the present
subject at a great American university. The instant that the image of
the “Odalisque with a Slave” by Ingres (Figure 7) was projected on the
screen, a number of Middle Easterners in the audience made a very
abrupt departure from the hall. It is exoticism in European art, and
not other aspects of orientalism, which evokes both the greatest
fascination and the deepest repulsion; it fascinates because of its appeal
to what a n interminable series of dreary Supreme Court decisions have
rather antiseptically termed our “prurient interest” while at the same
time representing for many partisans of the Islamic world a sort of
“pictorial slander” of Islam. Offensive at times to historical truth, the
sensibilities of women, the canons of good taste, the concept of racial
equality, and the concept of cultural tolerance, exoticism is the juiciest

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of the three wedges of our orientalist pie. But whatever it reflects about
the Orient pales before what it reveals of the troubled subconscious of
the Occident.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly where exoticism as a discrete aspect of
orientalism begins to emerge in the visual arts. Drawings said to be

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copies of works by Melchior Lorichs made around 1558, for example,

29 See Z. Rozanow and E. Smulikowska. The Cultural Heritage of Jasna Gbra, 2nd
ed. (Warsaw: Interpress, 1979). p. 71. I am indebted to my colleague Tadeusz Majda of
Warsaw University for this source.
 ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART

show the germs of exoticism in their depiction of nude women dancing

and making music in a purported peep into an lslamic harem.3"
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zyxw 27 1

Exoticism focuses on several themes: by far the most important is that

of sexuqlity and the harem. Also important are the themes of cruelty
and bloodthirstiness; drugs, alcohol and tobacco; horses and horse-
manship. Exoticism also has a long and' relatively blameless life in the
realm of this history of architecture, where Islamic fantasies may be
seen on buildings as diverse as a bizarre "Moorish" Bohemian teahouse
brought from a Paris exhibition to the grounds of Schloss Linderhof in
Bavaria by the crazy Wittelsbach Ludwig 112' to the considerably more
sincere gravity of the stately Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue in New
York City.32
The linchpin of exoticism, which offends the most viewers in both
East and West, but for widely differing reasons, is one of the most
pervasive and popular perjorative conceptions of Islamic culture: the
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notion that Islam, from private house to paradise itself, condones,
practices, and encourages all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable
manifestations of lust and the pleasures of the flesh. That Islam, the
most puritanical of all of the world's great religions, should have
achieved this reputation, is a measure of two things. The first is the
way Europeans either inadvertently or deliberately misinterpreted both
Islamic scripture (specifically, descriptions of Paradise) and Islamic
social mores (specifically, the institution of polygamous marriage). The
second is the difficulty Europeans have always had in reconciling any
concept of sexuality with their Pauline heritage of Epistolary
Christianity, with its constant warnings about the evils of the flesh, the
sins of pleasure, and the diabolical nature of lust. Be this as it may,
exoticism became a thriving industry in European painting during the
nineteenth century, and it is the backward-looking academic art of this

~-~

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period (rather than the forward-looking revolutions in European art
taking place during this time) which today has begun to beguile so

30 See E. Fischer, Melchior Lorck: Drawings from the Evelyn Collection at Stonor
Park figland and from The Departmeni of Prints and Drawings, The Royal Museum of
Fine Arts, Copenhagen (Copenhagen: Museum of Fine Arts, 1962), catalogue numbers

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54 and 55, illustrated p. 107.
3' The eclectic tastes of King Ludwig are perhaps best known from his Wagnerian

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castle Neuschwannstein near Munich, but the opportunity to buy the Moorish Teahouse,
purportedly an exhibition of the Bohemian crystal industry at a Pans World's Fair,
evidently was one he could not pass by.
32 For Islamic elements in Western architecture, see P. Conner, Oriental Architecture
in the West (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), and G.S. Bernstein, In Pursuit of the
Exotic: Islamic Forms in Nineteenth-century American Architecture (Ph.D. diss.) (Ann
Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1968).
272 zyxwvutsrq
zyxw THE MUSLIM WORLD

many auctioneers and dealers in London, Paris, and New York.’3

As mentioned above, exoticism with the Orient as a theme has been
around for a long time. Nicolay’s comments on Turkish women at the

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public baths show what people were inclined to believe. Rembrandt’s
portrayals of the subjects of Susannah and Bathsheba partook of this
general image. lngres’s “Grande Odalisque” of 1814, now in the
Louvre, is perhaps the most restrained of the genre, with her acres of
sub-zero skin and icy disdain. Delacroix’s “Odalisque” of ca. 1850 in
the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by constrast, is the most carnal
of the lot and its high heat makes it the only work in that venerable
institution which still appears to draw the attention of the aged
guardians who police its quiet halls.S4 But the range of exoticism is
much wider than this. The little porcelain figurines of Turks and
Turkesses modeled by Kaendler in Meissen represent exoticism in one
of its most charming phases; a delightful aspect of the Rococo style in
Europe, in addition to the better known “chinoiserie,” was the
“turquerie” which found its way into wall decoration and tiled ceramic
stoves (Figure 11)?5 In its more extreme examples, exoticism repre-
sents the paradox of what the viewing public in Europe wanted-they
wanted images of great sexuality and eroticism, which did not offend
their innate puritanism. When Manet painted his celebrated and
sensational nude portrait of the courtesan Olympia, who coolly

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appraises her onlookers like a high-class rug dealer looking a t some
miserable product of the looms of Hamadan, the painting shocked
Parisians by the thousands, some returning to be shocked dozens of
times. But had the turban been on Olympia and not on her servant,
and had the painting been entitled “Zulaika,” or some other name out
of Victor Hugo’s Orientales or Goethe’s Westostlicher Diwan, the
painting would have entertained without offending. The Islamic world,
in other words, provided a convenient and morally acceptable remove

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33 Publications resulting from this interest, in addition to the examples of sales
catalogues mentioned in note 1 above, include The Otienraiisrs (New York Rizzoli,
1979); J. Soustiel and L. Thornton, Mahmal et Aiiaiichs (Paris: J. Soustiel. 1979); and
Travellers Beyond the Grand Tour (London: Fine Art Society, 1980).
Reproduced [oddly enough] in black-and-white [more oddly still] in the standard
textbook, H.W. Janson’s Hisiory of Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Abrams and Prentice-Hall,
1977), p. 586, fig. 747.
Ceramic turquerie ranged the entire gamut from German porcelain stoves actually
molded in the form of seated, turbaned Turks, to the fireplaces constructed in imitation
of Turkish Iznik tile-work by the great British studio potter William de Morgan. The
example illustrated in Figure 10 is a detail from a large stove now in a restaurant in
Luzern, Switzerland.
 ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART

in which to portray the full gamut of European sexual fantasies, which

remained fantasies as long as they focused on the imagery of faraway
zyxw 273

places. I t was a useful way of evading the strictures of Saint Paul,

while at the same time sacrificing to Mammon, as the phenomenal
success of the American Hiram Powers’s pale tincture of orientalism
dissolved in exoticism, the famous “Greek Slave,” demonstrated at
fairs, side-shows, and expositions all over the continent of North
America.36
The theme of the harem woman, the so-called “0dalisque,”3~has a
thousand varieties in European art. Take the painting in words by
Victor Hugo:
Dis, crains-tu les filles de Grkce?
Les lys pales de Damanhour?
Ou l’oeil ardent de la ntgresse
Qui, comme une jeune tigresse,
Bondit rugissante d’amourP8

Hugo’s “Captive” could have stepped right out of an Ingres painting:

Je ne suis point Tartare
Pour qu’un eunuque noir
M’accorde ma guitare,
Me tienne mon miroir.39

The theme is a persistent one; it finds expression in the works of the

impressionists (Renoir’s “Odalisque” from the Chester Dale collection
in the National Gallery, Washington, is an excellent example) through

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the works of the post-Impressionists such as Matisse, who treated the

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The story of the peregrinations of Powers’s famous statue is a fascinating
commentary on American taste, and on the respectability which a classical or an oriental
“venue” could bestow on a work of art; its exhibition at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in
London made it one of the most popular works of art of the nineteenth century.
” The etymology of “odalisque” is evidently from the Turkish “odalik,” literally, “for
the (bed)room” and figuratively, “concubine.”
Speak! do you fear the daughters of Greece?

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The pale lily of Damanhour?
Or the burning eye of the negress,
Who, like a young tigress,
Leaps, raging with love?
Victor M. Hugo, Orientales I, ed. E. Barineau (Paris: M. Didier, 1952), “La Sultane
favorite,” 51-55.
39 Ibid., “La Captive,” 9-12.
 zyxwvutsrqp
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274 THE MUSLIM WORLD

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subject in paintings and prints by the dozens.@ In the nineteenth
century, the popularity of such works as Julia Pardoe’s profusely-
illustrated Beauties of’ the Bosphorus and Walsh and Allom’s
Constantinopie and ihe Seven Churches of Asia Minor in middleclass
Protestant parlors in England and North America meant that the
theme of the odalisque had to submit to a sort of virginal Victorianism,
of which Thomas Allom’s “The Favorite Odalisque” is a typical
example (Figure 12):’ No such Anglo-Saxon inhibitions ever affected
Ingres’s pupil Jean-Lton G;rome, whose famous painting of the “Slave
Market” in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
showing a nude female slave being examined closely by prospective
male buyers, exhibits a breath-taking degree of exploitation and old-
fashioned male chauvinism.42
The academic orientalists present another curious paradox, for they
were not only the most ardent practitioners of exoticism, with all of the
distortion of Islamic mores and beliefs which exoticism frequently
implies; at the same time they were in the details of their paintings
among the most assiduous of rapporteurs. Using photographs, or
extremely detailed sketches made in situ and borrowing all sorts of
objects from collections around them, the orientalists filled their
paintings with an amazing array of archaelogical detail. For example,
in the paintings of Rudolf Ernst, an Austrian orientalist, we encounter
scenes of the interiors of Turkish mosques in which several different
buildings, all recognizable immediately to a specialist, are abstracted in
detail to construct a pastiche of variegated “authenticity.’v3 Gtrome’s
famous “Snake Charmer” shows his nude herpetologist against a
meticulously-painted tiled wall taken directly from the Harem of the
Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. How Gtrome managed to produce this
almost photographic reproduction of a monument that w a s supposedly

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40 Cf. Alazard, L’Orienr er la peinture franprise, for Renoir; for Matisse, see, among

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others, A. Barr, Matisse, His Art and His Public (New York Amo, 1966).
41 Julia Pardoe, Bemrries of the Bosphorus: The City of the Sultan, and Domestic
Manners of rhe Turks in 1836 (London: G. Virtue, 1838); Thomas Allom and Robert
Walsh, Consranrinople und the Scenery of the Sewn Churches of Asia Minor (London:
Fisher, son, & co., 1838).
Illustrated in The Orientalisrs (New York Rizzofi, 1979). introduction by Michelle
Verrier, entry 27.
‘’ Ibid., entry 46. The mihrab of the mosque is taken from the mosque of Riistem
Pasha in Istanbul; the kiirsii or pulpit is from the Yeni Valide mosque in Istanbul; the
inscription above the mihrab is from a third building; the Iranian rug hanging on the pier
is totally out of place.
 ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART 275

guarded from the eyes of the outside world, remains a my~tery.4~ The
academic orientalists surrounded their voluptuous nudes, intriguing
courtiers, dissolute Pashas, headless corpses and headstrong warriors
with layer upon layer of the most impeccably-portrayed jewelry,
architecture, cityscapes, carved wood, carpets, and costumes. Their
influence was quite pervasive, and finally, inevitably, invaded the
Orient itself.

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The Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi studied in Paris, and then made

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quite a career of depiction of scenes of his native Turkey, working
primarily as a rapporteur in the style of the academic orientalists.45 But
how do we explain a work such as his “Mihrab” in which he portrays a
young woman dressed in a dtcolletb dress, seated in a rahle or stand
for the Qur‘an, directly in front of the mihrab or prayer niche of a
mosque, with manuscripts, presumably Islamic holy books, dumped in
disarray on the ground at her feet? This rather interesting piece of
exoticism recalls the crowning of a member of the Parisian demi-
monde as the Goddess of Reason upon the high altar of Notre-Dame
during the French Revolution.

Art- Historical Problems and Orientalism

The fascinating use of oriental imagery in European visual arts has a

long lineage. The Beatus manuscripts and the sculpture and architecture
of the Romanesque in France reflect Islamic influence on European art

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at its strongesttb while it is not until the fourteenth and especially the
fifteenth century in Italy that we see Islamic imagery in the art of
Europe developed to a significant degree. There are many other aspects
of the Orient in Western art in addition to those we have examined to

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thcs point in the present essay, among them the entire question of
chinoiserie and the influence of the cultures of Japan and South Asia?’

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*4 “The Snake Charmer,” from the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is
likewise illustrated in the Rizzoli volume, entry 42. An article analyzing this painting and
its sources is currently being prepared for publication by J.W. Bailey, Harvard
University.
45 See M. Cezar, Sanatta BayiLa A@$ ve Osman Hamdi(Istanbu1, 1971), after p. 312.

The original work is in the Hakgiiden Collection in Istanbul, and can be dated to 1901.
* See R.A. Jairazbhoy, Oriental Influence in Wesrern Air (Bombay: Asia Publishing
House, 1965); S. Ferber, ed., Islam and the Medieval West (Binghampton: State
University of New York Press, 1975); and A. Fikry, L’art Roman du Puy et les
Influences Islamiques (Pans: Leroux, 1934).
47 See Jairazbhoy, Oriental Influences. and H. Honour, Chinoiserie (London: Penguin,
1974).
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276 THE MUSLIM WORLD

the much-studied representations of Islamic carpets in European

paintings:’K the profound cultural interdependence in the area of arms,
armor and fortifications, and the role of Islamic textiles, ceramics, and
metalwork in the development of the European decorative arts. The
chief failure of historians of art in studying these phenomena has been
yet another aspect of the basic problem itself: historians of art are
trained in a Eurocentric curriculum structured by a Eurocentric
discipline, and a very significant criticism to be made of a large part of
the literature on orientalism in European art is that it proceeds from a
base of relative ignorance about the Islamic civilization whose imagery
is being used, about the attitudes and experiences of the European
practitioners of orientalism, and above all about the historical
background of these attitudes and experiences. If-as we stated a t the
outset-if is perhaps a bit naive to get overly exercised about the moral
corruption of some aspects of orientalism, it is also a bit naive to

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ignore the problem altogether.
But if orientalism is an integral part of the long history of Western
art, the pinnacle of orientalist exoticism was not reached until the early
years of the present century, in the Diaghilev production of Rimsky-
Korsakov’s Schhhhrazade. choreographed by Michel Fokine and

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designed by Lkon Bakst.4YHere, the visual arts combined with music,
theatre, and dance, in a virtual apotheosis of exoticism’s major themes:
lust, cruelty, blood, death, and passion. It is by now a familiar view of

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the Islamic Orient. The swing of the pendulum toward a more
moderate direction, returning to influence and abandoning imagery,
may be seen in the 1981 exhibition Islamic Allusions a t the Alternative
Museum in New York, where eighteen artists presented works in which
the impress of the Islamic world is felt profoundly, but which call up

has appeared in the journal Hafi in volumes 111 and IV (1981 and 1982).
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In addition to the work by K. Fkdmann, Europe m d der Orientreppich (Mainz
Kupferberg, 1962), an interesting series of articles by John Mills on various carpet types

4q See Diaghilev: Cosrumes and Designs of rhe Ballets Ruses (New York Costume
Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978). and Bahi (New York Rizzoli. 1980),
illustrations 4-12.
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ORIENTALISM IN EUROPEAN ART

no racial, religious, cultural, or social stereotypes.50 How the future

develops, and how we put the past into perspective, depends on an
277

elusive sort of enlightenment, one that is only developed through study

of and exposure to cultures other than our own. The record of
American education in particular is far from encouraging in this

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matter, and higher scholarship does not enjoy an unblemished record

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either. The excesses of orientalist art should remind us not only of past

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weaknesses but of present failures; the positive achievements of
orientalist art, on the other hand, should provide us with some hope
for a brighter future without cultural stereotyping.

Universiry of Massachusetts WALTERB. DENNY

Amherst. MA

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Jo April Kingsley, Islamic Allusions (New York: Alternative Museum. 1981); see also
the review of the exhibition by John Perrault, entitled “Mideast Pipeline,” in The Soho
News. January 14, 1981. I am indebted to my colleague Anne Mochon for the reference.