The Lure of the East

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting

This exhibition focused on the paintings made by British artists of the ‘Orient’, primarily during the nineteenth century. In this context the term ‘Orient’, to Western Europeans, meant those parts of the eastern Mediterranean world which could be accessed relatively easily, particularly after the development of steamboat and rail travel in the 1830s: Egypt, Palestine and Turkey. In these places, predominantly Muslim and at least nominally under the control of the Ottoman Empire, British artists, such as David Roberts, David Wilkie, William Holman Hunt, John Frederick Lewis and Frederic Leighton, sought to develop imagery which captured what they believed to be characteristic of the people, cities and landscapes of the region.