Long before the Sartorialist and the Gothamist, long before the internet and blogs, when even typewriters were considered new technology, there were the Orientalists.
These young men and women travelled to North Africa, Turkey and the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries, in search of adventure and exoticism. They were lured by dreams of gilded minarets and sensual harems. Many of them were artists. Some, like Byron (top left), were poets. And the images they brought back with them were a curious blend of fantasy and reality.
I very much enjoyed The Lure of the East, an exhibition of British orientalist painting at the Tate Britain in London. (It ends on August 31, so hurry if you want to catch it.) A great exhibition is like a good book: it informs you, inspires you, and floats on the edges of your imagination long after you've left it behind.
And who could fail to be inspired by the orientalists? It must have been wonderful to share a shisha pipe with members of The Divan Club, a group of adventurers who met regularly in London to discuss their travels around the Ottoman Empire. And I would no doubt have been enchanted by Mary Wortley Montagu, who spent long periods of her life in Constantinople, where she adopted local dress and investigated the hidden world of the harem. (This was a more domesticated arrangement than that imagined by her drooling male counterparts, who had bordellos on their brain. Simply change its name to "the ladies' wing" and you get the idea.)
It would have been less wise to get close to Richard Dadd, who went mad in the desert and, on his return, killed his own father in a bizarre fit of nominative predestination. But I wouldn't have minded interviewing the artist John Federick Lewis (right), who lived in Cairo and regularly painted himself in Arab dress. And what dress it is! The complex whirls of the turban, the crackling blue tunic, the broad magenta sash, the voluminous sarouel pants - baggy at the crotch and tight at the ankles - completed by soft turn-toed slippers.
The orientalists may have filtered the east through their fevered imaginations - the word fabulous springs to mind - but their impressions were generally positive. Too often, today, the western media associates the Arab world with upheaval and terrorism. Through the fascination of the orientalists, we see the allure of these rich cultures.
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