A major exhibition of British orientalist painting was perhaps the must-see show in London this summer, writes David Tresilian The Lure of the East, an exhibition of mostly 19th-century British orientalist paintings that closed on 31 August after a three-month run, was the major show at London's Tate Gallery this summer. Having been at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven earlier this year, it can next be seen in Istanbul in the autumn before it moves to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates for the final leg of what has been an international tour. Curator Nicholas Tromans has cast his net far and wide, and the exhibition includes works from major British public collections, as well as from tiny provincial museums, Oxbridge common rooms and the British government's official art collection. Some of the works on show are presumably more usually seen on embassy walls or gracing Whitehall corridors. Paintings have also been lent by museums and galleries in Europe and the United States, and private collectors from as far afield as the Gulf and Japan have chipped in with otherwise rarely seen works. While French orientalist painting tends to be better known internationally than British and contains a higher proportion of works by major artists, the genre was an international one, a consequence of easier travel to the Middle East and North Africa for European artists from the mid 19th century on, as well as of increasing European political and economic involvement in the region. Many European countries produced artists specialising in "oriental" subject matter of women in harems, Bedouin, Middle Eastern street scenes and picturesque, if usually dilapidated, mosques, tombs and palaces. French artists are usually taken to have established the genre of orientalist painting following the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 and the subsequent colonisation of the country. This provided an opportunity for Delacroix, for example, to produce images of the Orient that caught at what was perceived to be its atmosphere of eroticised languor and decay, such as in his famous painting of Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1834), an early harem painting now in the Louvre in Paris, as well as at its romantic wildness or savagery, such as in oriental history paintings like La Mort de Sardanapale (1827), loosely based on something by Byron. Compared to the French tradition continued in the harem scenes of painters like Chassériau, or in the focus on oriental cruelty in the polished paintings of slave markets and similar scenes by Gérôme, British orientalist painting tended to be rather tame, as the Tate exhibition reveals. While there is often a similar perception of the Orient at work in their paintings -- seeing it as unchanged since ancient times, or as a source of moral lessons on backwardness and decay, or as a kind of fabulous mixture of opulence and ruin -- 19th-century British orientalist painters tended to moralise the scenes they produced and invest paintings of domestic interiors and Middle Eastern streets with narrative content. As a result, the Orient in British orientalist painting often comes out looking less glossy than it does in the works of the French painters, becoming, as Tromans notes in one of the many excellent essays he has contributed to the exhibition catalogue, almost suburban in tone. This is especially true if one compares the harem scenes produced by French painters, perhaps drawing on the images of Turkish baths produced by Ingres, to those painted by the British artist John Frederick Lewis, whose works are heavily featured in the present exhibition. Lewis's versions of the Middle East, the groundwork for which was laid while he was resident in Cairo in the 1840s, assisted by E.W. Lane's famous work on the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, show it as a place of small dramas in almost pre-Raphaelite mode, with paintings such as An Intercepted Correspondence (1869), A Lady Receiving Visitors (1873) and The Hhareem (1850) -- the additional 'h' is a piece of cod orientalism inserted to give the picture an air of authenticity -- representing some momentary event in minutely detailed interiors that seem "characterised not so much by tyranny and intrigue" in French orientalist style "as by a devotion to domesticity." This focus on genre painting, showing events from everyday life and from the oriental family circle, might be taken as a special feature of British orientalist painting. Another might be the fact that while some major 19th-century British artists dabbled in the Orient, perhaps most notably, and lastingly, the pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, most did not, leaving the field open either to industrious specialists, such as David Roberts, whose lithographs of Middle Eastern scenes filled Victorian albums, or to sometimes delightfully marginal artists and amateurs. One such was Richard Dadd, who, while he trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London where he was a close associate of Frith, painter of The Railway Station and Derby Day, is probably best known for the meticulous paintings of fairies he completed in the Bethlem Asylum ("Bedlam") after killing his father, thinking him to be the devil. Before this happened Dadd completed a tour of the Middle East in 1842-43, using it as inspiration for paintings such as the wonderfully atmospheric Halt in the Desert (1845), apparently showing a resting Bedouin caravan, and The Flight out of Egypt (1849-50), an historical pot-pourri that shares a family resemblance with Dadd's fairy paintings. Both of these works are in the Tate show. Another unusual Victorian artist represented in the exhibition, this time by his watercolours and oils of Palestine, was Edward Lear, better known for his nonsense verse. Unlike Dadd, Lear had no formal training and his images of the Holy Land, so called because of its biblical associations, seem to have been produced as part of the "topographical" art he produced while on walking tours of Greece and Italy and as acts of personal piety. For many British visitors to Palestine at the time the chief interest of the landscape, often disappointing to them according to Tromans, was that it seemed unchanged since the time of Christ, with the natural vistas around Jerusalem in particular perhaps looking essentially the same as they had in the 1st century CE. The presence in the Tate exhibition of works by artists like Dadd and Lear underlines the range of 19th-century British artists' responses to the Orient, showing how these were sometimes highly eclectic, and the different ways in which such artists used the conventions of orientalist painting. This, together with the close analysis of individual works provided by the catalogue commentaries, notably Emily M. Week's admirable essay-length analysis of works by Lewis, should cause visitors to this exhibition to look again and more closely at the genre as a whole and to leave with a keener sense of how it connects to British 19th-century culture. The Lure of the East is divided into six rooms devoted to the familiar subject matters of the orientalist portrait, genre and gender, harem and home and Middle Eastern land- and cityscapes, chiefly those of Palestine and Jerusalem. Half way through there is a room given over to documentary materials on the history of the Middle East, as viewed from Europe, and the history of European involvements in it. The terminus of the exhibition is the end of the First World War, the most recent pictures in the show being Augustus John's well-known portraits of Emir Feisal and T.E. Lawrence in broadly Bedouin garb and paintings from the 1920s by David Bomberg and Stanley Spencer. There are delightful surprises throughout. In the first room, for example, devoted to orientalist portraits, there are some well-known images such as Thomas Philips's portrait of Byron "dressed as an Albanian" (1814), the kind of vaguely Ottoman dress likely to have been worn by characters in his Turkish Tales, and John's portrait of T.E. Lawrence in the traditional dress of the Hijaz. However, this kind of cross-cultural dressing was apparently not restricted to celebrity authors like Byron and Lawrence. There are also images of Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and translator of the Thousand and One Nights, in Arab dress and paintings, self-portraits this time, of Holman Hunt and Lewis in the oriental dress they apparently wore in Cairo. According to the catalogue, this taste for oriental impersonation, well-known in the case of Burton who boasted of visiting Mecca dressed as an Afghan, can be understood as part of a strategy of self-fashioning and self- promotion, as it was in the case of Lawrence, or as an experiment in disguise and in the adoption of a fluid identity that was "emblematic of a broader impatience with the conventions and social mores of Victorian society." The second room, on "genre and gender," contains paintings by Lewis, Holman Hunt and others, including Lewis's much-discussed The Seraff -- A Doubtful Coin (1869) and other Cairo street scenes. Highlights here include works by the late 19th-century artist Arthur Melville, one of which is used as advertising material for the show ( An Arab Interior, 1881). Melville's watercolour the Cock Fight (1900) shows a group of men gathering round to watch a cock fight, the cocks themselves, the focus of the picture, dematerialised in a cloud of dust and feathers. Unfortunately, this painting is not reproduced at anything like adequate size in the catalogue. A later room on "harem and home" brings together Lewis's pictures of home life in Cairo, a painting by Gérôme purporting to show a Cairo slave market (1871) being included for contrast. The Music Lesson (1877) by Lord Leighton, probably the late 19th-century's best-paid society painter, is also interestingly paired with Two Musicians (1880) by the Ottoman Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey. Leighton, following Lewis, represented the harem as "a place of almost English domesticity," his women engaged in useful occupations like giving music lessons to children. According to Tromans, Hamdi Bey, one of the most important Ottoman painters, "has simply replaced the model of Gérôme, with whom he may have studied in Paris in the 1860s, with that of Leighton." Such pairings suggest the ways in which Middle Eastern artists may have begun to perceive their own societies through an orientalist lens. The exhibition's final room on "the Orient in perspective" includes Dadd's Halt in the Desert among other paintings of Bedouin, picturesque ruins and panoramic landscapes. An earlier room on "the Holy City" features views of Jerusalem, as well as of religious life in Cairo. Some of the paintings include impossible mistakes, such as Leighton's Interior of the Grand Mosque at Damascus (1873/5), which "shows a man praying at ninety degrees to the mihrab (indicating the direction of Mecca and hence the principal focus of prayer), while the minbar is conceived as of central importance, as if we were in a Protestant church." While orientalist painters were often fascinated by the architecture of the mosques they painted, they did not necessarily have any real understanding of the religion these buildings represented. Nevertheless, their appreciation of the architecture could have its own sort of value: Leighton's painting is a valuable record of what the prayer hall of the Grand Mosque looked like before the terrible 1893 fire, for example, and Joseph Farquharson's The Hour of Prayer: Interior of the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, Cairo (1888), usually kept in the City of Aberdeen Art Galleries, captures something of the grandeur of this building's interior. The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, Tate Gallery, London, until 31 August 2008. Then at the Suna and Inan Kirac Foundation Pera Museum, Istanbul, 23 September to 4 January 2009, and the Sharjah Art Museum, UAE, February to April 2009.
