Ken Jacobson
ODALISQUES AND ARABESQUES
Orientalist photography 1839–1925
308pp. Quaritch. £60.
0 9550852 5 3

Charles Newton
IMAGES OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
128pp. V & A Publications. £30.
1 85177 505 7

William H. Martin and Sandra Mason
THE ART OF OMAR KHAYYAM
Illustrating FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat
184pp. I. B. Tauris. £39.50.
1 18451 282 0


"Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about, very different in demeanour from the sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended by sallow faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women with black nosebags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and bargained at the doors of the little shops."

So Thackeray described the bazaar in Smyrna in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. This evocation of crowds, costumes and racial types was a cliché in Orientalist travel writing; for example, Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, wrote of the thronging inhabitants of Istanbul as follows: “No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes – every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts”. And there is much more in the same vein.

Bustling crowds and colourful robes were things that nineteenth-century photography could not conjure up. The primitive technology of the camera and lengthy exposure times, as well as the frequent hostility of Turks and Arabs to having their pictures taken, meant that photographers produced a cumulative vision of the Orient that was starkly at odds with that evoked by prose writers. The Orient of the photographers was full of ruins and quietly melancholic, depopulated landscapes. As Charles Newton observes of a photograph of the fountain of Ahmed III in Constantinople, taken around 1860, the “monochrome image suggests an air of dereliction and decay, even when precisely and rapidly rendering the details of the architecture. There is no colour and life that a painter might suggest, and the street vendors are shown only as part of a scene of poverty”. When countrymen and swarthy Arabs did allow themselves to be photographed, it was not in the crowded streets, but more often in a studio with a fake landscape on the backcloth. Alternatively, they were posed as anonymous figures beside an ancient ruin or piece of statuary in order to give a sense of scale.

In Odalisques and Arabesques, Ken Jacobson shows that the history of Orientalist photography begins weeks after the invention of photography itself. The secrets of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s method of trapping light were revealed to a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts on August 19, 1839. Eighty days later, the Orientalist painter Horace Vernet made a daguerreotype of the entrance to the Harem of Muhammad Ali in Alexandria. From the first, the history of Orientalist photography developed in parallel with that of Orientalist painting.

Quite a few literary figures were hostile to photography. Baudelaire accepted its value as a way of recording ruins before they passed into oblivion (and here he was perhaps thinking of Maxime Du Camp’s photographic record of the antiquities of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey made in the years 1849–51), but also denounced it as an industrial process lacking in spirit or imagination. Ruskin was at first enthusiastic about the daguerreotype, because it, like the best paintings, reproduced the truth, but he later came to disapprove of it as a mechanical process.

Delacroix also attacked photography for its unbearable accuracy, and he never showed any interest in mimicking the realism of the camera. But, more generally, academic Orientalist painters were enthusiastic about photography. A photograph could serve as a convenient aide-mémoire for an artist reworking oriental scenes back home. It might also provide an additional source of income, as photographic studios could sell reproductions of their paintings. Moreover, even before use of the camera became common, the licked finish of the canvases of Ingres, Gérôme, Deutsch and others in which individual brush strokes were made to disappear, anticipated and mimicked the texture of photographic images. Baudelaire characterized photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. But Orientalist painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Tissot give him the lie, as do non-Orientalists such as Courbet and Degas, who also made use of photographs.

On the other hand, many of the early photographers were in thrall to painterly values. The leading Orientalist painter Gérôme and the remarkable stay-at-home Orientalist photographer Roger Fenton both studied with the academic painter Paul Delaroche. With the judicious use of props, Fenton, who had trained as an artist and who Jacobson suggests was perhaps “the greatest English photographer of all time”, conjured up Nubian genre scenes in his London studio. As Jacobson notes, Orientalist photographs “reflected similar themes and styles to those seen in paintings by J. F. Lewis, Ingres, Chasseriau and Delacroix”. He also remarks that there are iconographic motifs in the world of painting that have been repeated over the centuries, so it is not particularly surprising that with the advent of the camera, photographers should have chosen to present matching compositions. Such continuity of tradition would be even more likely if the photographer either trained as a painter or if the consumers of his products were artists.

The early Orientalist photographers were heroes. The glass plates they brought out to the East were monstrously heavy and bulky. The developing usually had to be done on the spot in stifling conditions. (Francis Frith’s wickerwork darkroom was mistaken by locals for his harem.) In the heat, collodion was liable to evaporate or bubble over. It was difficult to get hold of clean distilled water. Photographers were making good speed if they managed to take more than half a dozen pictures a day. Often they were stoned by the locals for no other reason than that they were wearing Western dress.

As well as a chapter devoted to “Orientalist Painting and Photography”, Odalisques and Arabesques includes a discriminating history of the genre, a discussion of its morality, a fine selection of plates, brief lives of the photographers, and a guide to the technical processes. Jacobson is not an academic, but a collector and enthusiast. Nevertheless, he has conducted a great deal of scholarly research on the often obscure careers of photographers and the intertwined histories of the Levantine studios of Bonfils, Sebah and others. (It was a common practice for studios to sell on their photographs to one another.) Jacobson has no difficulty in demonstrating that many of the past criticisms of Orientalist photography are based on ignorance either of chronology or technology.

In Images of the Ottoman Empire, Charles Newton, a former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, presents and comments on a small selection of watercolours, sketches, prints and photographs of the Ottoman lands from the museum’s collection. Many of those images were first collected in the 1960s and 70s by Rodney Searight, an oil executive who became an enthusiast for such scenes. The best-known Orientalist watercolourists of the nineteenth century were David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis. Of Lewis’s “Life in the Hareem Cairo”, Newton observes that “the exquisite finish, the ambiguity of the narrative and the intimate nature of these interiors made Lewis the British equivalent of Vermeer, and not just a decorative painter of Orientalist themes”. The watercolour in question is indeed covertly anecdotal in the way so many seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are. In place of the eroticism that the title might suggest, one finds domestic serenity of the sort that is present in so many of Vermeer’s interior scenes.

One of the things that emerges from Newton’s book (and from earlier research by Gerald Ackerman) is how much Orientalist painting of the nineteenth century owed to the earlier Dutch painters. Rembrandt, who collected Oriental artefacts for use as props and studied Mughal miniatures, was a precursor of nineteenth-century Orientalist painting. In the early part of that century, seventeenth-century Dutch painting was rediscovered. Gérôme, among others, transposed the stock themes of Dutch genre painting to the Middle East. Where the Dutch had painted the burghers of the night watch, he painted Albanian soldiers and Nubian guards. Where the Dutch painted card players, he did Egyptian chess players, and, in place of the cool interiors of Dutch churches, he offered instead Muslims at prayer in ornately tiled mosques. The French salon critic Thoré Burger was chiefly responsible for the rediscovery of Vermeer in the 1860s (too late for Lewis to have actually been influenced by him), but the more general rediscovery of Dutch art had come earlier, with Turner and Constable. Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century often viewed Egypt and the Levant through Dutch spectacles. The novelist and Orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin’s book Maîtres d’autrefois (1876) consisted of a series of studies of the Flemish and Dutch old masters who had been his inspiration.

The Dutch precedent apart, the subject matter of Orientalist art was largely dictated by the public who bought the paintings. David Roberts was one of many who became prosperous through painting biblical landscapes. Others, like Holman Hunt and James Tissot, painted carefully researched scenes from the Bible. In Holman Hunt’s case, the scenes he painted were heavy with allegory. There was also a strong demand for paintings and photographs of Egyptian antiquities. Flaubert’s travelling companion, Maxime Du Camp, was among the first to provide such photographs. Then the market wanted pictures of horses. As Newton remarks, it “is difficult to understand now in the age of the internal combustion-engine, the sheer pervasiveness of hippomania”. Fromentin wanted to paint more camels, but he was warned by his dealer that what the buyers wanted was more pictures of horses. As well as horses, the gentry wanted pictures of hunting. Newton comments on a watercolour of Arabs hunting wild goats near Petra that “with the Victorian obsession with hunting, this scene was a familiar theme set in unfamiliar surroundings”.

The Bible and horses apart, there was a demand for bright images of a region that was hardly touched by industrialization, and where the sun shone and the air was clear of grime and damp. Prosperous Victorians, who were normally obliged to wear dark suits, wanted pictures of throngs of people dressed in flowing robes in all manner of colours and fashions. Quite often indeed they had themselves painted or photographed in Oriental dress. It is a vulgar error to believe that Orientalist art consisted mainly of images of despotic pashas, harem girls and summary beheadings. Most Orientalist paintings and photographs were of landscapes. The artists and their public might find the exotic and erotic exciting, but, to judge from the artists’ writings, the Oriental light was even more exciting. Delacroix was entranced by the Moroccan light. Roberts remarked of the light of Egypt that it “washed out colours, banishing vibrant tints to the shadows”. Henri Regnault in Spain and Morocco became practically a worshipper of the sun. Fromentin criticized photography for its failure to capture the quality of the light in North Africa.

Occasional portrayals of whirling dervishes, Ouled Nail women and wild Moroccan fantasias apart, what Orientalist artists mostly offered their clientele was a sedate, dignified and cleaned-up Orient. The public whom they worked for and who attended the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the Paris Académie displays were far more likely to have had some sort of education in art than today’s gallery-goers. Then sketching and painting were desirable social accomplishments. Also it was not unknown for officers to take up landscape sketching as an auxiliary military skill. The nineteenth-century public was aware of the techniques and materials of the artists in a way in which most of us today are not.

Fake Orients were produced by stay-at-home painters and photographers working with miscellaneously assembled studio props. Illustrations to the Rubáiyát of Umar Khayyám offered another kind of fake. Edward FitzGerald’s first version of the Rubaiyat (1859) was published in the same decade as In Memoriam and The Origin of Species, and FitzGerald’s essentially Victorian pastiche of Persian themes reflected the age’s doubts about revealed religion, providence and immortality. As William H. Martin and Sandra Mason show in their attractively produced The Art of Omar Khayyam, the first illustrated edition of the Rubáiyát appeared in 1884 with monochrome, vaguely classical pictures by Elihu Vedder. Martin and Mason have attempted a comprehensive listing of British and American editions together with a handful of Iranian ones. With advances in the technology of colour printing in the 1890s the trickle of illustrated Rubáiyáts became a flood. The authors take a Wisdenish batting-average approach to their subject as they diligently enumerate the number of illustrated editions published in each decade. For example, “the most popular quatrain has over fifty different illustrators identified, while for the least popular quatrain we have identified only four illustrated editions”. The authors have counted and listed what they can and presented some of the results in pie charts. The main body of their text consists of a verse-by-verse comparison of how the various illustrators tackled each quatrain. So, for example, quatrain 23 runs as follows: “Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, / Before we too into the Dust descend; / Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, / Sans Wine, sans Song sans Singer, and sans End!” Gilbert James (1909) illustrated this with a girl sitting in front of a rose bush, behind which lurks a turbaned white-robed Death. René Bull (1913) showed an Oriental princeling (misidentified by the caption as a girl), under the escort of a skeletal Death armed with a scythe, descending into the unknown. An anonymous artist (1918) produced a black-and-white illustration in which, mystifyingly, Chinese men appear to be larking about and having hallucinations in what might be an opium den. Muhammad Tajvidi (1959) showed a willowy girl in a flowing robe, clutching a cup and flask and calmly gazing down at a large blue face that is emerging from the shrubbery. Although the authors have refrained from making value judgements about the illustrations they have selected for reproduction and commentary, I find myself unable to follow their example. What we are faced with is mostly an encyclopedia of visual kitsch.

A few notable book illustrators, Jessie King, Frank Brangwyn and Edmund Dulac, did produce versions of the Rubáiyát. (Dulac’s illustrations, produced in 1909, some years before his palette brightened after a visit to Tunisia, are more muted in colour than his later jewel-like illustrations to Princess Badoura and Sinbad.) Otherwise the list of those who did not do a Rubáiyát would read like a roll-call of honour in the history of book illustration: Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, Heath Robinson, Walter Crane, Helen Stratton, Edward Julius Detmold, Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, Eric Gill, John Minton, Eric Fraser.

The mostly hack work that is on display dimly reflects successive aesthetic credos: Pre-Raphaelite, art nouveau, art deco and neo-Romantic. The visual fantasy conjured up is of a medieval never-never land of arts-and-crafts markets, rose gardens, grey-bearded sages, scantily clad damsels and other folk in colourful and loosely flowing robes. The air is thick with allegory. There also seems to have been a broad consensus among the illustrators that the Rubáiyát is an erotic text. Far more damsels feature than are licensed by FitzGerald’s verses. For those who like their Orient to be erotic, John Bateman’s 1958 version with its busty, cheery nudes can be recommended. (If only Beardsley had been tempted.) The best of the rest are mostly artists who had made themselves masters of the four-colour process and had often also learnt from Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Anne Fish, Doris Palmer and Robert Sherriffs worked well with clearly outlined expanses of bright colour. Charles Stewart has obviously studied Persian art of the Timurid and Safavid eras and pastiches it rather well. Dulac had an expert knowledge of Persian miniatures. Other illustrators learnt from their grander Orientalist predecessors. Thus, for example, Andrew Peno’s “mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord” of quatrain 44 in an edition of 2001 seems to have been modelled on Regnault’s “Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada” (1869).

Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies was published last year and his book on the Alhambra appeared in 2004. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.