In July of 1798, Napoleon marched into Egypt and defeated the Turks at the Battle of the Pyramids, weakening past breaking point the waning Ottoman Empire. He was driven out a year later by the British, but in that small amount of time he had already changed everything: because following him came first a trickle and then a torrent of westerners into the Near and Middle East. They came and they journeyed through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Arabia and North Africa. Many of them wrote about their experiences, sparking a deep fascination with these exotic, mysterious lands.
The artists came too, and they painted what they saw: bazaars and souks; robed and moustachioed Arabs smoking hookah pipes; mosques and minarets; Turkish baths and harems. With time this became an art movement and today we call it Orientalist art. I love it for the way it conjures up the exotic, and although it is clear that some artists let their imaginations get the better of them (I’m thinking of the harems, which no artist can have actually seen), their depictions of these lands must have inspired many a beating heart to visit.
One such Orientalist was French painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1856, he visited Egypt for the first time and followed the classic grand tour of a typical occidental visitor to the Orient: up the Nile to Cairo, then to Abu Simbel, across the Sinai Peninsula and through the Wadi el-Araba to the Holy Land, Jerusalem and finally to Damascus. He gathered themes, artefacts and costumes for his oriental scenes, and then set to work, soon establishing a reputation back home which saw him become honorary President of the French Society of Orientalist Painters.
There’s a gallery, below, of several of his Orientalist works, giving a good flavour of what he was about, and below that my favourite piece of the lot, The Carpet Merchant. I have travelled quite extensively myself in these lands, from Istanbul, Beirut and Damascus to Marrakesh, Petra and Cairo; and nothing quite beats the simple pleasure of wandering the snaking alleyways and souks of an old quarter, and taking in the sights, sounds and smells of life there. The Carpet Merchant captures that feeling perfectly.
