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The Orientalist Sale
As part of the its Orientalist & Islamic Week on 21 and 22 April, Sotheby’s presented The Orientalist Sale featuring 42 lots showcasing important Orientalist paintings and luxurious works of art of the “Orient”; a term used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe present-day Turkey, the Levant and Middle East, North Africa, and lands as Far East as Persia and India.
For the most part, Western nineteenth-century artists travelled to the East from across America and Europe to try and capture the ‘Orient’ faithfully. The resulting European representations, far from being the visual embodiment of an exoticising, colonialist agenda, were faithful depictions of the sights that many of the artists experienced first-hand.
“The Orient exerted its allure on the imagination of Western artists for centuries, and today the appeal of their work is as strong as ever…” commented Claude Piening, Sotheby’s Head of Orientalist Paintings.
