| |
|
| |
The Romantic Orient
Major historical events in the East contributed greatly to its
increased topicality in the West: Egypt gained independence from the
Ottoman sultans in 1805: the Greek War of Independence against the
Turks took place between 1821 and 1830. during which Lord Byron died
at Missolonghi (1824); and the French conquered Algeria in 1830. The
Orient, as it was perceived by Europeans, included such countries as
Greece and Algeria; although technically outside the geographical
area of the Orient, they were nevertheless categorized with Egypt as
exotic, Eastern lands. A single trip to the East was sufficient to
provide many painters. Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863).
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps (1803-60), and
Theodore Chasseriau (1819-56) among them,
with a new and inexhaustible-aesthetic vocabulary. Others undertook
lengthy tours, familiarizing themselves with different aspects of
the culture of the indigenous populations, which they faithfully
reproduced in small-scale genre scenes. The Scotsman
David
Roberts (1796-1864) and the Frenchmen Eugene Flandin
(1809-76) and Eugene Fromentin (1820-76) illustrated their travels in
paintings and diaries. Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet (1789-1863) brought
to his paintings his experience of travelling in Algeria, Morocco,
Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Crimea. Primarily a military
painter, Vernet is best-known for his imposing battle scenes, but he
also painted animal subjects inspired by his travels. The Spanish
artist Mariano Fortuny y Carbo (1838-74), who visited Morocco twice,
was another notable producer of battle paintings. The English
painter John Frederick Lewis (1805-76) recorded his ten-year sojourn
in Egypt on canvases notable for their meticulous precision and
attention to detail. For many of the Romantic artists, the "journey
to the Orient" was essentially a voyage to a place beyond reality, a
haven for the soul and a refuge from everyday life. These exotic
lands served as a kind of multicoloured, alluring mask of the more
mysterious side of the human psyche. Many artists who succumbed to
this allure never actually set foot in the East, including
Ingres
(1780-1867), John Martin (1789-1854), and
Francesco Hayez
(1791-1882). In some cases, literary sources proved as inspirational
as first-hand experience. Lord Byron's series of Oriental poems.
Victor Hugo's Les Orientates, the Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem by
Chateaubriand, and works by Heinrich Heine, Dumas Pere, Alphonse de
Lamartine and Theophile Gautier were among the sources widely
enjoyed. For the Romantics, the exotic was often explicitly linked
with the erotic, founded on the myth that the Levant (modern-day
Lebanon, Syria, and Israel) enjoyed a laxity of morals quite
unthinkable in Europe. Eroticism became an area free from moral
conventions; bodily sensations were no longer idealized, but seen in
all their carnal and sensual reality. The link between eroticism and
the female nude was developed further in the second half of the 19th
century, when the so-called pompiers (the humorous name given to
artists seen as having little talent) in France and the Victorian
painters in England created images more overtly erotic than had ever
been seen before in the history of painting.
|
| |
__________
__________
|
| |
David
Roberts
(b Stockbridge, nr Edinburgh, 24 Oct 1796; d London,
25 Nov 1864).
Scottish painter. The son of a shoemaker, he was apprenticed to a
house-painter. From 1816 until 1830 he was employed in the theatre
to design and paint stage scenery, first in Edinburgh and Glasgow
and after 1822 in London. While in Scotland he met and worked with
Clarkson Stanfield and later collaborated with him in London on
dioramas and panoramas. Among Roberts’s commissions from Covent
Garden were the sets for the first London performance of Mozart’s
Die Entführung aus dem Serail in 1827.
|
|
|
| |
__________
__________
|
| |
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
(b Paris, 3 May 1803; d Fontainebleau, 23 Aug 1860).
French painter, draughtsman and printmaker. With his brother
Maurice-Alexandre (1804–52), the art critic and essayist, he spent
some years of his youth at Orsay, in Picardy, ‘in order to learn to
rise early and know the hard life of the fields’. The artwork of the
peasants stimulated an interest in drawing. He entered the atelier
of Etienne Bouhot (1780–1862) in 1816. Towards the end of 1818 he
left Bouhot to study under Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, quitting
his studio in 1819–20 in order to embark upon a career as an
independent professional artist. He had been an inattentive student,
who thought that ‘the formula of instruction of the academic
doctrine reduced the least examination almost to the proportions of
silliness’. Memories of Orsay remained his point of departure
throughout his working life, and in this sense he was a self-trained
artist. Nevertheless, he admired, and learnt from, the art of such
diverse artists as Raphael, Titian, Giovanni da Bologna, Poussin,
Rembrandt, Géricault and Léopold Robert.
|
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
Turkish Children Playing with a Tortoise
|
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
The End of a Turkish Schol Day
|
| |
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
The Turkish Patrol
|
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
Turkish Bodyguards on the Road from Magnesia to
Meander
|
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
The Defeat of the Cymbrians
|
| |
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
Before a Mosque (Cairo)
|
| |
 Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
Woman in Oriental Dress
|
| |
Alexandre-Gabriel
Decamps
Young Oriental woman in an interior
|
| |
__________
__________
|
| |
Eugene Flandin
(1809-1876)
|
| |
Eugene FlandinScutari
|
| |
Eugene Flandin
Constantinople
|
| |
Eugene FlandinCaravanserail
de Kachan Perse
|
| |
__________
__________
Images of Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet courtesy of
www.jennmaur.com
|
see collectnon:
Horace Vernet |
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet
(b Paris, 30 June 1789; d Paris, 17 Jan 1863).
Painter, son of Carle Vernet. He was born in his father’s lodgings
at the Palais du Louvre, where his grandfather Joseph Vernet also
lived; his maternal grandfather was Jean-Michel Moreau. To these
antecedents and influences are ascribed the supreme ease of his
public career, his almost incredible facility and his fecundity. His
early training in his father’s studio was supplemented by formal
academic training with François-André Vincent until 1810, when he
competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome. He first exhibited at
the Salon in 1812. In 1814 Vernet received the Légion d’honneur for
the part he played in the defence of Paris, which he commemorated in
the Clichy Gate: The Defence of Paris, 30 March 1814 (1820;
Paris, Louvre;), a spirited painting that represented a manifesto of
Liberal opposition to Restoration oppression.
|
|
|
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet Judas und Tamar
|
|
|
|
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet
The Duke of Chartres Saves the Engineer Siret from Drowning in
August of 1791 in Vendome
1847
|
|
|
|
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet
At the Tomb of Colonel Mouginot, 1817
|
|
|
|
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet
Leonilla Furstin
|
|
|
|
Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet
Study of Olympe Pelissier as Judith
1830
|
| |
__________
__________
|
|
INGRES AND ORIENTALIST EROTICISM
|
|
Francesco Hayes
Ruth
1835 |
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Turkish Bath
1859
|
With Ingres' late work,
Turkish Bath, the role of the pure, chaste,
Neoclassical nude as an expression of moral dignity gave way to that
of the Romantic nude as an expression of wantonness and hedonism.
Turkish Bath positively exudes steamy air. heavy scents, and the
languid laziness of the w omen's bodies. Following
Ingres' sensuous
vision, any feminine form shown in an Oriental setting - whether
mythological, biblical, or real-life — was portrayed as an
icon. La Toilette d'Esther Theodore Chasseriau, a pupil of
Ingres',
and Ruth by
Hayez are just two examples of biblical subjects imbued
with a powerful atmosphere of desire and melancholy. Such sentiments
had been conveyed with a sense of modesty by
Delacroix (1798-1863)
in The Women of Algiers, a rich and exotic work inspired by his trip
to Morocco in 1832.
|
Theodore Chasseriau
La Toilette d'Esther
1841
|
|
|
Eugene Delacroix
The Women of Algiers
1834 |
| |
__________
__________
|
|
|
EUROPEAN INFLUENCE IN THE ORIENT
In a kind of reverse form of Orientalism, Western influences often
combined with indigenous styles to create hybrid strains of
decoration and design in the East. In China, the Western style
arrived during the Manchu period. During the reign of Emperor Ch'ien-lung
(1736-95), the Jesuit missionary Giuseppe Castiglioni (1698-1768)
became a court favourite through his paintings, which combined
Chinese brushwork with traditional European perspective. In 1747, he
also planned Neo-Baroque-style buildings on the site of the ancient
Ming palace. In Turkey, in the middle of the 18th century a new
movement from the West led to the development of Turkish Rococo. The
decoration and furnishings of the royal palace in Dolmabahce
(1843-56) in Istanbul reflected a combination of styles: huge
crystal chandeliers from Bohemia or Baccarat and murals by Russian
and Italian artists.
In the 19th century, the royal palace at Bangkok, the P'ra T'inang
Chakkri, incorporated a room built by English architects inspired by
the Italian Renaissance. Sculptors from Southeast Asian Buddhist
countries copied the clothes and physical features of the Dutch and
Portuguese to give the dvarapala, the divine guardians of the temple
doors, a sterner aspect. Finally, in Japan, with the opening up of
markets in the Meiji period (1868-1911), the upper classes began to favour Western dress, and their furniture also displayed Western
influences.
|
__________
__________
|
The End of the Dream
With the development of steamships and the railways, the opening of
the Suez Canal in 1869. and the increasingly widespread use of
photography, the East became more accessible and familiar. Likewise,
the influence of Western customs and costumes spread to the East,
even leading some local ladies in Turkey to discard their
traditional garments in favour of crinolines from the House of Worth
in Paris. Gradually, the Orient was stripped of its mythological
aura. In 1826, in Istanbul, Mahmud II suppressed the janissaries,
and Western reforms were introduced to the capital by various
organizations, including those devoted to law. education, and the
economy. Some artists now began to represent a harsher vision of the
Orient - blind beggars, cripples, filthy streets, and peeling
plaster - that was at variance with earlier, idealized images. The
French poet Gerard de Nerval was to tell Theophile Gautier that he
regretted having formed his own idea of Egypt in his imagination.
The real Egypt having been "bitterly impressed on my memory", de
Nerval had lost an imaginary, wonderful place in which he could take
refuge with his dreams. Large numbers of Europeans now beat a path
to exotic locations. Merchant adventurers, missionaries, and. above
all, soldiers, all brought back objects from the Old World. These
became a source of inspiration for the production and wide
availability of a range of goods: furniture, clothing, trinkets, and
even games displayed the Oriental stamp, while interior and garden
design were both strongly influenced by the styles of the East. At
the end of the century, the mythical Orient enjoyed a final season
of splendour, corresponding with the demise of the odalisque.
Artists from vastly differing schools were united by the liveliness
of treatment that they brought to Oriental themes: they included the
French sculptor and painter Jean-Leon Gerome
(1824-1904), Gustave
Boulanger (1824-88),
Georges Clairin (1843-1919),
Mariano Fortuny y Carbo, and
Hans Makart (1840-84). In 1873, Jules-Antoine Castagnary
wrote: "Orientalism is dead", yet twenty years later, the Societe
des Peintres Orientalistes was founded, with
Gerome as the honorary
president of the society.
|
|
|
Jean-Leon Gerome
Harem Pool
Hermitage, St. Petersburg
|
see collection:
Theodore Chasseriau
David Roberts
"A Journey in the Holy Land"
Eugene Fromentin
Mariano Fortuny y Carbo
John Frederick Lewis
Jean-Leon Gerome
Gustave
Boulanger
Georges Clairin
Hans Makart
|
|
|
 |
|
|
