Orientalism Art and Paintings

In art, Orientalism means 19th-century European paintings of North Africa and the Middle East: streets and markets, mosques, deserts, soldiers and imagined harems, often painted in sharp, authentic-looking detail. The National Gallery in London calls it a fluid, complex and contentious term, French in origin, and says many of these paintings reflected Western stereotypes of people then under colonial control. The Getty's art vocabulary files it under exoticism, as Western art that takes up the look of Asian art or culture.

Sources: National Gallery: Orientalism (glossary) · Getty AAT: Orientalism

Orientalist paintings combine precise, convincing detail with drama and fantasy. Tate says British Orientalists sought to convince their audiences that their pictures were authentic, often with intensely detailed compositions, while also deriving drama and romance from the East; in images of the harem and the Holy Land the two impulses were often in tension. The Clark Art Institute says Gérôme's accurate architecture, ornament and costume give an impression of overall accuracy even in scenes he could not have witnessed.

Sources: Tate: The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painters (press release) · Clark Art Institute: Snake Charmer, collection catalogue entry (PDF)

Orientalism belongs mainly to the 19th century. The National Gallery in London links its emergence to Napoleon's conquest of Egypt at the turn of the 19th century and to the later French colonization of North Africa, and Tate says Orientalist painting flourished after steam travel made Cairo, Jerusalem and Istanbul relatively easy to reach. Western painters had pictured the region before and went on doing so after: Tate's 2008 exhibition The Lure of the East covered British painting from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Sources: National Gallery: Orientalism (glossary) · Tate: The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painters (press release)

No, but the two are linked. Orientalism in art is the 19th-century painting of North Africa and the Middle East; Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) is a critique of how the West represented the East, which he defined as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The Clark Art Institute notes that Gérôme's The Snake Charmer was illustrated on the cover of the book, although Said never mentioned the painting, and that many later authors have examined Orientalist painting in the light of his argument. The National Gallery in London calls it a contentious term.

Sources: Clark Art Institute: Snake Charmer, collection catalogue entry (PDF) · Pera Museum: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cultural Interactions in the Age of Change · National Gallery: Orientalism (glossary)

The best-known Orientalist painters are Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, John Frederick Lewis and Eugène Fromentin. The Pera Museum in Istanbul calls Gérôme one of the first names that come to mind for Orientalist art; the National Gallery in London says Ingres is famous for his escapist scenes of the Orient and that Fromentin specialized in North African scenes; and the UK Government Art Collection calls Lewis England's chief Orientalist artist. The Spaniard Mariano Fortuny, the Russian Vasily Vereshchagin, who studied with Gérôme, and the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey, who knew him, also painted the region.

Sources: Pera Museum: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cultural Interactions in the Age of Change · National Gallery: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · National Gallery: Eugène Fromentin · UK Government Art Collection: John Frederick Lewis · National Gallery: Mariano Fortuny · Russian Museum: Vasily Vereshchagin

European artists painted North Africa and the Middle East because conquest, travel and the art market all pointed them there. The National Gallery in London ties the rise of the genre to propaganda around Napoleon's conquest of Egypt and to the later French colonization of North Africa; Tate says steam travel made Cairo, Jerusalem and Istanbul easy to reach; and the National Gallery says Fromentin turned images from his journeys into pictures to satisfy the French taste for oriental subjects. Some went on official business: Delacroix traveled to Morocco in 1832 with the French envoy Count de Mornay.

Sources: National Gallery: Orientalism (glossary) · Tate: The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painters (press release) · National Gallery: Eugène Fromentin · Minneapolis Institute of Art: Delacroix, Fanatics of Tangier (Google Arts & Culture)

Orientalist paintings were often accurate in their details but not in the scenes as a whole. The Clark Art Institute shows that Gérôme copied the tiles of The Snake Charmer from photographs of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and the floor from his own picture of a mosque in Cairo, and set a performance from Egypt in a room he invented, a scene he could not possibly have witnessed. Tate says harem and Holy Land pictures in particular leave viewers to question their accuracy, while the Petit Palais finds a fairly precise picture of people, objects and costumes in Benjamin-Constant's Moroccan funeral scene.

Sources: Clark Art Institute: Snake Charmer, collection catalogue entry (PDF) · Pera Museum: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cultural Interactions in the Age of Change · Tate: The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painters (press release) · Petit Palais, Paris: Benjamin-Constant, Le jour des funérailles (Paris Musées)

Delacroix painted Moroccan subjects for decades after his journey of 1832, when he traveled with the French envoy Count de Mornay to the sultan of Morocco. The Minneapolis Institute of Art says he watched the frenzy of the Aïssaoua sect from an attic in Tangier, the scene of his Fanatics of Tangier (1837–1838). He painted the sultan leaving his palace at Meknes for the Salon of 1845 and showed Jewish Wedding in Morocco at the Salon of 1841. His Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, bought at the Salon of 1834, hangs in the Louvre.

Sources: Minneapolis Institute of Art: Delacroix, Fanatics of Tangier (Google Arts & Culture) · National Gallery: Eugène Delacroix · Musée des Augustins, Toulouse: Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco (Joconde record, French) · Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum

Gérôme's best-known Orientalist paintings include Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, Prayer in the Mosque, The Snake Charmer, Bashi-Bazouk and The Carpet Merchant. He first went to Istanbul in 1853 and to Egypt in 1856, and the sketches and photographs he brought back from many later journeys supplied these pictures, the Pera Museum says. The Carpet Merchant shows the court of the rug market in Cairo, which he visited in 1885, according to the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Sources: Pera Museum: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cultural Interactions in the Age of Change · Clark Art Institute: Snake Charmer, collection catalogue entry (PDF) · Minneapolis Institute of Art: Gérôme, The Carpet Merchant (Google Arts & Culture) · Metropolitan Museum of Art

Orientalist paintings of women are mostly of two kinds: imagined harem and bath scenes, and portraits or studies of women the painters met on their travels. Tate says harem pictures in particular mixed claims of authenticity with drama and romance. On this page, Sargent's Arab Woman and Egyptian Woman with Earrings and Gérôme's Veiled Circassian Beauty are of the second kind, while Delacroix's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834) shows women in an interior in Algiers.

Sources: Tate: The Lure of the East, British Orientalist Painters (press release) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Louvre Museum

Romanticism is a broad movement of feeling, drama and nature that Tate dates to about 1780–1830, while Orientalism is defined by its subject, North Africa and the Middle East, and runs through the whole 19th century. The two overlap: Delacroix, whom the National Gallery in London calls the leading exponent of Romanticism in French painting, painted Moroccan subjects after 1832, and the Louvre hangs his Women of Algiers in its Romanticism gallery. In 2012 the Musée Condé in Chantilly titled an exhibition Delacroix and the Dawn of Orientalism.

Sources: Tate: Romanticism · National Gallery: Eugène Delacroix · Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum

No. Orientalism is art by Western painters, mostly French and British, picturing North Africa and the Middle East; the Getty's art vocabulary defines it as characteristics of Asian art or culture appearing in Western practice. Islamic art is art made within Islamic cultures themselves, such as the Persian manuscript paintings on our Islamic art page.

Sources: Getty AAT: Orientalism · National Gallery: Orientalism (glossary)

The Louvre in Paris holds Delacroix's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, in its Romanticism gallery, and his Jewish Wedding in Morocco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds Gérôme's Prayer in the Mosque and Bashi-Bazouk. Gérôme's The Snake Charmer belongs to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and his Bonaparte Before the Sphinx to Hearst Castle in California. Delacroix's Sultan of Morocco is in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, Fortuny's Battle of Tetouan in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Osman Hamdi Bey's The Tortoise Trainer in the Pera Museum in Istanbul.

Sources: Louvre Museum · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Clark Art Institute: Snake Charmer, collection catalogue entry (PDF) · Fondation Napoléon: Bonaparte devant le Sphinx, dit aussi Œdipe (French) · Musée des Augustins, Toulouse: Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco (Joconde record, French) · Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya: The Battle of Tetouan · Pera Museum: The Tortoise Trainer

Yes. Every painter on this page died by 1928, so their paintings are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain