Orientalist Painters and Writers at the Crossroads of Realism

This article explores the developing interest in the Near East as subject matter among painters and writers of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Near East became a popular subject for both painters and writers formed in the academic and classical tradition and for those identified with Romanticism and Realism. Worlds apart esthetically, yet all trained in the Neoplatonically oriented French school system, artists and writers of this period struggled to reconcile their views and artistic practice with the knowledge gained from their new discoveries of archaeology and with growing interest in ethnography, anthropology and folk art. Through the study of "orientalist" writings and art work, one can see the artistic and intellectual crossroads that marks the nineteenth century as the major period of change in the western tradition. (EJMJr.)