There’s still a market for the more “exotic” pictures among American and European buyers, who are especially keen for scenes with vibrantly colored rugs and wall fabrics or such architectural details as Ottoman mosaics and mashrabiyya—wooden window screens that let in light through a grille. For the increasingly dominant Middle Eastern buyers, however, obvious errors or elements that indicate a lack of cultural sensitivity are a turnoff, says Brian MacDermot, the chairman of London’s Mathaf Gallery, which has been handling Orientalist paintings since 1975. He points out that “collectors notice incorrect postures in the mosque, subjects wearing leather shoes when they shouldn’t be. I try to avoid those kinds of paintings, anything that might give offense.”

M. Shafik Gabr is a collector in Cairo who owns about 90 Orientalist works, which he began buying in the early 1990s. He says that Said’s analysis does not always ring true: “A lot of the Orientalist painters contributed to reducing the cultural gap. Unlike many Western people who came to the Middle East as exploiters or as invaders, for that matter, these painters came to understand the culture. Some of them may have represented it incorrectly, but they are not the majority.” Many Orientalist artists traveled to the East, made sketches of what they saw, bought fabrics and rugs and then returned to Paris or London to paint their pictures. While the images weren’t necessarily demeaning, modern-day collectors can tell the difference between works rooted in the culture and those composed from a hodgepodge of exported exotica.

“When someone knows a little about the Middle East and North Africa and sees a painting that’s obviously completed in a studio in England, he immediately recognizes it for what it is,” says Ertug. “The results are theatrical. I don’t think today’s Orientalist collectors are chasing theatricality. I think they’re chasing history and national identity.” Paintings that contain some timeless element—a famous landscape or a busy market still operational today—seem to be most sought after, he adds.

Thus a handful of painters who thought of themselves as documentarians, or peintres ethnographiques, are most coveted. Ludwig Deutsch, Gérôme, Lewis, David Roberts and David Wilkie not only traveled to far-flung locations, but often lived there for long periods to produce their works. The Scottish Roberts explored Spain and Morocco in the early 1830s and toured Egypt and the Holy Land at the end of that decade. Wilkie, a fellow Scot, journeyed in the region from 1840 to 1841—a one-way trip, since he died at sea on the voyage home—and Lewis spent an entire decade, from 1841 to 1851, in Cairo. Gérôme, whose works depicting Eastern subjects are thought to be his finest, traveled to Egypt in 1856 and 1861 and back in Paris taught students at the École des Beaux-Arts how to paint Orientalist scenes.

Pictures by these ethnographes sell for anywhere from $300,000 to $4.6 million. The Austrian-born Deutsch’s Leaving the Mosque, 1900, brought £916,000 ($1.8 million) at Christie’s London in June 2007, beating its high estimate of £350,000 ($693,000). Prices are expected to rise. “The works of the great artists who brought Eastern subject matter to the Western world were all undervalued, and now they’re finding their value in this country and abroad,” says Benjamin Aryeh, the owner of New York’s Rafael Gallery. “The problem now is that the great subjects that were painted by the top Orientalists— Gérôme, Ernst and others—are already very hard to come by.” Gérôme’s painting Veiled Circassian Beauty, 1876, sold last summer at Christie’s London for £2,057,250 ($3.8 million), a world-record price for the artist at auction.

Reflecting the heightened interest in the Middle East, Western museums and galleries are paying greater attention to these images. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, last year devoted a new gallery within its expanded 19th- and early 20th-century wing to Orientalist art, featuring Gérôme’s 1871 genre masterpiece Prayer in the Mosque. The Tate Britain this summer held an exhibition in London titled “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Paintings,” which focused on 19th- and 20th-century British painters such as Lewis, Wilkie and William Holman Hunt. The show appeared at the Yale Center for British Art in the spring and is currently at the Pera Museum, in Turkey, through January 2009, when it heads to the Sharjah Art Museum, in the United Arab Emirates.