Orientalism

Orientalism is an art movement of the 1800–1910 period. The gallery holds 881 works in this movement, including works by Henri Regnault, Jean Léon Gérôme and Johann Georg Platzer. Browse Orientalism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Orientalism was a current in Western art, most vigorous in nineteenth-century Europe, devoted to the depiction—and frequently the imaginative reinvention—of the Middle East, North Africa, and, to a lesser degree, East Asia. Its catalyst was Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801), whose accompanying scholars produced the monumental "Description de l'Égypte" and ignited a European fascination with the lands the period called "the Orient." Antoine-Jean Gros gave the theme early grandeur in "Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa" (1804). As colonial expansion accelerated—above all the French conquest of Algiers in 1830—travel, trade, and empire opened the region to artists, and Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, who exhibited scenes of everyday Eastern life at the 1831 Salon, became one of the genre's founding figures.

Two temperaments shaped the movement's look. The Romantic strand, led by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), prized vivid color, turbulent movement, and emotional extremity, as in "The Death of Sardanapalus" (1827–28) and, after his formative 1832 journey to Morocco and Algeria, "Women of Algiers in Their Apartment" (1834). The academic strand, exemplified by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), pursued the opposite: a polished, near-photographic finish, archaeological precision, and meticulously observed detail applied to bazaars, mosques, baths, and slave markets.

Gérôme remains the genre's defining master, and our collection holds several of his canonical works—"Slave Market in Rome," "The Moorish Bath," and "The Great Bath at Bursa"—alongside his classicizing "Pygmalion and Galatea." His "Snake Charmer" (c. 1879) later became Orientalism's most argued-over image. Other principals include Henri Regnault, whose theatrical "Salomé" we also hold, the Spaniard Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838–1874), prized for dazzling light and brushwork, and the Italian Alberto Pasini. Academic painters such as Alexandre Cabanel ("Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners") and Lawrence Alma-Tadema extended the taste for the exotic past into antiquity.

Orientalism gained institutional standing with the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, founded in Paris in 1893 by Nasreddine Dinet and Léonce Bénédite. Rooted in Romanticism and Academic art, its luminous palette helped prepare the way for later colorists. Since Edward Said's influential study "Orientalism" (1978)—which placed Gérôme's "Snake Charmer" on its cover—the movement has also been read critically, as imagery entangled with the assumptions and power of European empire.