“The Lure of the East” is the first major exhibition of this genre since 1984, when “The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, the Allure of North Africa and the Near East,” composed of about 100 pictures dating from the Napoleonic era to 1914, ran at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The current show challenges peoples’ assumptions, fed by Said’s critique, that “there was something wrong with Orientalists’ images,” says its curator, Nicholas Tromans. “That was an incentive to do the exhibition—to reexamine some of these issues, to ask these questions: Were these images connected to imperial colonial projects? The answer is, in a strict sense, no.’ ”

Middle Easterners are looking to these paintings for a sense of their heritage. “The Persian Gulf doesn’t have much of a history of art and architecture compared with Istanbul or Jerusalem or Damascus,” says Tromans. “By buying Orientalist paintings, collectors can have a bit of the Dome of the Rock or those Moroccan fabrics and monuments, courtesy of Western artists.”

Until recently, only a couple of galleries internationally focused on Orientalist art—Mathaf, in London, Galerie Nataf, in Paris, Rafael, in New York—while some dealers in 19th-century painting, such as Mark Murray, in New York, and Darnley Fine Art, in London, handled it as a subcategory. Lately, though, new galleries and museums are popping up in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Sharjah, and they are seeking to assemble works that represent the whole span of Middle Eastern cultures. “The market is tending to go for the best things now,” says MacDermot. “The rush to build museums in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia is amazing. They are either borrowing shows, or they are slowly starting to purchase works.”

Christie’s and Sotheby’s are also competing for preeminence in this growing field. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s recruited Ertug to create a new Orientalist department, based in New York, with an active schedule of three dedicated sales annually. By June, the house had added a fourth to its 2008 roster, to be held in New York this month.

For its part, Christie’s announced in late May that it had appointed Étienne Hellman as its new international director of Orientalist art. Hellman, who joined Christie’s Paris in 2000 as a specialist in the 19th-century department, is charged with presenting “an international platform” for Orientalist paintings. The house will hold four dedicated sales in the category a year, with the primary ones in July (in London) and October (in New York). And Christie’s Paris will hold auctions of 20th-century Orientalist pictures, as well as ones by contemporary Arab and Iranian artists, in both June and December.

Coy says that Christie’s, which still appears to be the leader in this market, has made a very aggressive push into the Middle East, setting up an office in Dubai and holding auctions there since 2006 in international modern and contemporary art, as well as in jewelry and watches. Its presence in the emirate also allows its specialists to make inroads into the market for Orientalist pictures in the region.

Most property coming to auction now is from Western collections built in the early part of the 20th century to as late as the 1970s and ’80s, says Ertug. Coy adds that about 75 percent of the pictures come from American collections of 19th-century art that include one or two Eastern-themed paintings. “It’s going to get harder to find the top-quality things,” she says. “These works aren’t bought by dealers; they’re bought by collectors. They go into private collections and don’t come out.”

This month, both houses have auctions in New York. Christie’s comes first, on October 22, with “Orientalist Art and 19th-Century European Art and Bouguereau and the Academic Tradition.” The following day, Sotheby’s holds an afternoon sale that includes Gérôme’s 1888 The Black Bard. This stunning painting of a Nubian man in a coral-colored robe seated in front of a blue Iznick-tiled wall speaks eloquently of the exotic beauty that once so entranced Western travelers and now captivates Middle Eastern collectors in search of vestiges of their cultural and historic identity.