And Another Thing | 23 July 2008

For anyone interested in fine painting, as distinct from ‘great art’, there is a treat at the Tate for them: a display of works by British artists, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, who depicted the Orient and those who liked to dress up in Eastern style. Many of the pictures are from private collections, and this is a rare chance to see them; they are often in their original frames, well preserved and of great beauty.

The pellucid waters of this subject were thoroughly stirred and muddied by the polemicist and troublemaker Edward Said, who invented ‘Orientalism’ as a term of political and racial abuse, and won himself a following in left-wing academia by his misrepresentations, even after he was exposed as a fantasist in a famous article published in Commentary. It was typical of Said that he presented Mansfield Park as a novel about colonialism and the slave trade.