Orientalist painting

Résumé du document

Today, we are going to talk about Orientalist painting. In this way, I'm going to present you the general aspects of that kind of painting: its historical context, its specificities, its recurrent themes, its criticisms and finally its decline. Throughout this presentation, I will try to show you several Orientalist paintings, so that you can have a more precise idea of what this artistic movement is. Until the middle of the 17th century, the main link between the East and the West was trade. It is only at the end of the 17th century and in the whole 18th century that the European interest for the East really aroused. At that time, Europeans had a huge fancy for what is called in French ‘les turqueries'_ that is to say works of Oriental inspiration, at that time it mainly imitates the Oriental designs. It could be found for instance in domains like painting, literature, theatre, clothing or ornament. We can see it for instance in Boucher's L'odalisque brune (1) which represents a naked woman in a setting that wants to look Oriental. We can see that with the blue cloth, the low table at the left, the jewels, and the feathers on her head... Boucher tried to make of an ordinary Western woman (his wife) an odalisque.

Extraits

[...] Orientalist Painting Table of contents Introduction 1-When and why this Orientalist movement emerge ? 2-What are the specificities of Orientalist painting ? Orientalist painting is not a genre. The travel. Improvements in the technique of painting. Recurrent themes. Historical paintings. The landscapes. Women and seduction in Orientalist painting. Late Orientalism and its decline. [...]

[...] Historical paintings. Painters, when they went in the East, often took advantage of colonial missions. In this way, some of them became real reporters, showing to Europe the important steps of colonization in the East. Thus, at the beginning of the 19th century (when trip conditions had not developped yet), there were lots of historical paintings_One of them being Gros's Bataille des Pyramides(12). This battle was very important in the progression of the Napoleonian march on Egypt. In fact, Gros had never travelled in the East. [...]

[...] Women and seduction in Orientalist painting. In fact, to represent beautiful Eastern women, painters often used the pretext of representing harems or baths. As we have already seen pictures of baths ( Jean Lecomte du Nouy's L'Esclave Blanche, Ingres's Le Bain Turc, Edouard Debat-Ponsan's Le Massage, scene de hammam I'm going to focus my attention on harems. The harem is positively the most well known institution of the East and thus one of the favourite subject matter. The word ‘harem' in fact refers to an isolated place in the house where only women, children, female slaves and eunuches_eunuches being hired to protect the harem, being thus a sign of wealth. [...]

[...] Flaubert for instance described an Orientalist as being a whoo has traveled widely'. Most painters began to travel in the 1830s to try and give the most accurate representation of the East, standing in opposition with the 18th century ‘turqueries'. However, as trip conditions at that time were very harsh because of exotic diseases and of robbery, their trips were often short and seldom_as more and more painters travelled to the East, trip conditions evolved. Painters often took advantage in colonial missions to travel_even if they did not always agree with the colonialist thought. [...]

[...] Another reason can be found in the fact that, after the French Revolution, a new class came to have a financial power and what they mainly wanted was change. In this way, after a period of very academic paintings, this new bourgeoisy was more likely to buy paintings representing another landscape than the industrious one of Europe at that time. Thus, we are going to see what attract European in Orientalism, describing its specificities. What are the specificities of Orientalist painting? [...]