Orient Expressions

NEW HAVEN—“The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830–1925,” a new exhibition of almost 90 paintings, prints and drawings, makes its first (and only U.S.) stop this month at the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut. Running from February 7 to April 28 and showcasing rarely seen works by the likes of Edward Lear and William Holman Hunt, the show is a richly detailed testament to imperial Britain’s obsession with the eastern shore of the Mediterranean—or at least the idea of it. Rendered with a fine combination of exactitude and colonialist fantasy, scenes of harems (strikingly represented by John Frederick Lewis’s watercolor Hhareem Life, Constantinople, 1857) and of busy Cairo streets hang beside portraits of pashas (the Ottoman Empire equivalent to a British lord). The show travels to London’s Tate Britain in June before making its way to the Pera Museum, in Istanbul, and the Sharjah Art Museum, in the United Arab Emirates.

"Orient Expressions" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.