Books : The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting

With its unprecedented focus on the history of Orientalism in British art, this handsome book places the British within the story of how the genre was established in the 19th century—a story heretofore dominated by the French. Featuring both well-known and rarely seen paintings, together with sketches and photographs, this volume examines the work of British artists who engaged with Middle Eastern themes over three centuries, from the 1620s to the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922.

Included are works by Joshua Reynolds, J. F. Lewis, W. H. Hunt, David Wilkie, John Singer Sargent, William Holman Hunt, J.M.W. Turner, Roger Fenton, Andrew Geddes, and Edward Lear. Many of their images are, or purport to be, the result of direct observation of actual places in the Middle East. The book spotlights numerous topics of timely cultural interest, including the cross-pollination of British and Islamic artistic traditions, as well as Western myths about the Islamic world in relation to artists’ actual experiences.