Sotheby’s to present The Orientalist Sale as part of Orientalist & Islamic Week

KOLKATA: On 8 April 2014 in London, Sotheby’s will present The Orientalist Sale as part of Sotheby’s Orientalist & Islamic Week. The auction comprises masterpieces by leading European and American Orientalist painters, including Ludwig Deutsch, David Roberts, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Etienne Dinet and Frederick Arthur Bridgman, as well as select works of sculpture.

The genre of Orientalist art has undergone a revision in perception over the last thirty years. Orientalist paintings are today coveted by collectors and institutions in the Middle Eastern and North African region, for whom they offer fascinating glimpses into their countries’ history before the widespread use of photography and when representative painting was little practiced by local artists.

Western nineteenth-century artists travelled to the East from across America and Europe with an agenda: to try and capture the ‘ Orient’ faithfully in order to enlighten their audiences at home and to raise the bar for themselves, not only in terms of their reputations but also the self-imposed challenge of painting sites, cultures and the intense desert light few had experienced before.

The resulting European representations of the ‘Orient’ (the nineteenth-century descriptor for Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa), far from being the visual embodiment of an exoticising, colonialist agenda, were faithful depictions of the sights that many of the artists experienced first-hand.

Claude Piening, Sotheby’s head of Orientalist Paintings, said in an email statement: "Orientalist art was very much an art for Western consumption when it was first produced. What’s interesting now is how that consumption has moved toward the very countries that are depicted in the paintings. We have seen the rise of collectors, both private and institutional, in North Africa and Egypt, the Gulf and the Middle East generally, and this is what has contributed to the current strong market for Orientalist art."