The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting
4 June - 31 August 2008
Tate Britain- Admission Charge

The Halt in the Desert, by Richard Dadd, c.1845, is a beautiful painting. It is the image of a group of men gathered around a night-time fire under a moonlit sky, beside a knot of palm trees and horses – whoa! Horses? Should they not be camels?

In the nineteenth century, British people going to the Middle East felt they already knew it, declared Nicholas Tremons, curator of The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting exhibition, now at Tate Britain. I, too, already had that feeling, having gleaned my knowledge of the ‘orient’ from the Arabian Nights. Indeed, tales of genii and flying carpets, handsome princes and lost princesses, sultans and harems, still fascinate me.

As I grew older, politics and reality kicked in as I read with horror and sadness of the daily misery and fear of many people living in certain countries surrounding the Mediterranean. It seemed as if those parts of the world where east and west collide were always going to be politically and culturally compromised simply because of their geography. Yet it wasn’t always thus.

Scholars accept the Middle East as the cradle of civilization, at least interesting enough for the Romans to have conquered it. It’s the place from whence we derive our system of numbers, our habit of scribbling our daily thoughts in our diaries, and our penchant for perfumes and downing intoxicating brews, be they tea or coffee.

It is no wonder then that, as soon as the eastern Mediterranean could be accessed relatively easily by steamboat and rail from the 1830s, travellers from the west began to go to Egypt, Turkey and Palestine. Eighteenth-century travellers had already blazed a trail to the east, demonstrated by paintings like the massive James Dawkins and Robert Wood discovering the ruins of Palmyra, 1758, painted by Gavin Hamilton in 1758. The fulcrum of the exhibition rests upon the argument: are these images authentic?

The difficulty with painting and, indeed, all kinds of visual representation is that we see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. In short, much of what we see is based upon myth. A myth is a supposition that arises from half-forgotten memories embellished with daydreams and aspirational yearnings. Consequently a myth always opposes the truth. Paradoxically, a lie is not a myth but often has a basis in reality. The myth is never grounded in reality. How many tourists come to Britain and take away with them a product bearing an image of the Haywain, by John Constable? How many of us live in a house that looks like Willy Lott’s cottage?

But Lure of the East is about busting myths, not creating them. For instance, there are a number of images of the harem. The harem was not the place of sexual licence so fondly imagined by the average Westerner. It was actually a private domestic quarter to which only women and their children had access. According to eighteenth-century traveller and writer, Lady Mary Worthley-Montagu, the harem was a liberating, exclusively female space, with its own distinct culture and rituals. (Press Copy)

But judge for yourself. There are 110 paintings in this exhibition, many of them astonishingly beautiful. Do not overlook Edward Lear’s Petra, painted 1859 or John Frederick Lewis’s The Commentator on the Koran: Interior of a Royal Tomb, Bursa, Asia Minor, painted 1869. The latter painting boasts the most wonderful fat, white cat. It is open until August 31.

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