Draft:Orientalist painting in the ottoman empire

• Comment: could be a good article; needs additional reliable sources, fact checking etc Cinder painter (talk) 07:32, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

---

Orientalism in Ottoman Paintings

Orientalism in Ottoman Paintings refers to painters, paintings, and artistic movements influenced by the rise of Orientalism in the Ottoman Empire that took place around the early 16th century. Orientalism had a broad influence on Western society and culture from the 16th-19th centuries, affecting art, fashion, and Western literature.

Ottoman Orientalism

Orientalism arose in the Ottoman Empire due to the gaze of Western society and the empire’s adoption of Westernization. Orientalism as a whole, was a western construction that treated the Orient as an “other”, portraying the Orient as exotic and largely uncivilized. The Ottoman Empire did not experience much of this portrayal, as the West had more familiarity with Ottoman culture. When the Ottoman Empire sought to westernize around the late 18th century, they adopted their own form of Ottoman Orientalism. In doing this, they distanced themselves from the Orient, and treated groups like Arabs and Bedouins as scapegoats for perceived exotic and uncivilized behavior from the empire. Various forms of Oriental art in the Ottoman Empire emerged, including Orientalist painting.

Characteristics

Orientalist paintings generally had three main focuses. They were used as propaganda against the Islamic world, often through depictions of moral depravity and cruelty portraying Islamic rulers in power. Paintings also served as a record and communication of the experience of the Orient, through recreations of customs and settings. Finally, these paintings sensationalized the Oriental world, as part of the cultural othering that resulted from Orientalism as a whole. Other themes commonly associated with Ottoman Orientalist paintings include gender, sexuality, female slavery and the harem, wealth and luxury, and depictions of Oriental architecture. Due to their reliance on photographic images, paintings depicting Islamic architecture are a functional record for archeologists to study, especially regarding architecture that no longer stands or has been substantially altered.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Harem

In Imperial fictions: Europe’s myths of Orient, Rana Kabbani, on the popularity of Orientalism in Europe, wrote: “Europe was charmed by an Orient that shimmered with possibilities, that promised a sexual space, a voyage away from the self, an escape from the dictates of the bourgeois morality of the metropolis,”. Paintings of harem scenes and those with more erotic aesthetics, grew more popular in Europe during the 19th century, though depictions of the harem varied from country to country. French Orientalist art was more comfortable with nudity and promiscuity, while British artists adopted a more reserved perspective, with their depicted harem women generally having more clothing.

'British Artist John Frederick Lewis’ ‘The Harem’

In the paintings of male Orientalist artists, women were generally characterized as sexually promiscuous and available, while the men were characterized as violent and powerful. There were several female Orientalist artists that challenged these notions of gender. Artists such as Henriette Brown and Mary Adelaide Walker depicted women in Ottoman harems with more of a mix of lavishness and gaudiness. In these paintings, interactions between harem women were represented more often than ideas of women as sexual objects of male desire. Many of these artists witnessed and were directly involved with the harem as a societal institution.

A Visit (Harem Interior, Constantinople, 1860) by Henriette Brown