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. So visitors to the show should forget about such nonsense, and allow their own eyes to speak.
The division between East and West, in effect between Europe and Asia, has existed for 4,000 years, and Western intellectuals have attempted to bridge it from Herodotus on. The first significant figure to engage in systematic borrowing from the Levant was the 13th-century Emperor Frederick II, known as Stupor Mundi, and during the Renaissance painters such as the Venetian Gentile Bellini specialised in Eastern images, and a number of rich men and women dressed up in Oriental clothes. There were many more on the Continent than in Britain, and they can be studied in the best book on the subject, L’univers des Orientalistes by Gerard-George Lemaire, an English translation of which was published in Cologne in 2001.
The most fascinating pair of pictures in the Tate show were painted early in the 17th century by an unknown artist.
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