Description: This is a captivating and Fine Antique Old 1920s ORIENTALIST Exotic Arabian Arab Harem Girls Oil Painting on Canvas, which depicts a lurid and evocative scene from the interior of a 19th century Arabian harem, likely somewhere within in the palace of the Sultan. The subjects, who are alluring and beautiful fair-skinned women, wear luxurious gowns, ornate lace and sumptuous jewelry. They appear to be playing a game similar to Marco Polo, with the central figure wearing a bandana over her eyes and reaching out toward the voices of the women on the left. Within this large palatial room, fine furniture, musical instruments, oriental rugs, and hanging incense burners can be seen. This painting does not appear to be signed, but perhaps you recognize the artist or their work? This painting likely dates to the 1910's - 1920's. Approximately 51 3/4 x 70 inches, nearly four by six feet! This piece was intended to hang from small metal loops which are sewn into the top edge of the canvas, similar to a hanging tapestry. Several of these loops are missing and would need to be added for this piece to hang from a wall as intended (please see photos.) Very good overall condition for age and storage, with some light scuffing and edge wear throughout. It can be surmised that this piece originally hung in a night club, brothel, speakeasy, or affluent home, and if it could talk, it would have some very interesting stories to tell. Acquired from an old estate collection in San Francisco, California. Due to the large size of this piece, S&H costs will be unavoidably high. However, Free Local Pickup from Los Angeles County, California is also an option. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About this Artwork: Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art The Orient—including present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa—exerted its allure on the Western artist’s imagination centuries prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. Figures in Middle Eastern dress appear in Renaissance and Baroque works by such artists as Bellini, Veronese, and Rembrandt, and the opulent eroticism of harem scenes appealed to the French Rococo aesthetic. Until this point, however, Europeans had minimal contact with the East, usually through trade and intermittent military campaigns. In 1798, a French army led by General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and occupied the country until 1801. The European presence in Egypt attracted Western travelers to the Near and Middle East, many of whom captured their impressions in paint or print. In 1809, the French government published the first installment of the twenty-four-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809–22), illustrating the topography, architecture, monuments, natural life, and population of Egypt. The Description de l’Égypte was the most influential of many works that aimed to document the culture of this region, and it had a profound effect on French architecture and decorative arts of the period, as evidenced in the dominance of Egyptian motifs in the Empire style.Some of the first nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings were intended as propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule. Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835)—a pupil of Jacques Louis David and a history painter in Napoleon’s employ who never traveled to the Near East himself—conveys this idea in Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa (1804; Musée du Louvre, Paris), featuring an Eastern architectural setting and figures in exotic dress. A propagandizing work, it depicts the general’s visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa. Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. Proponents of the Romantic movement, such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), also avidly took up themes of violence and cruelty in Oriental subjects. Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; both Louvre) embody in images of war and destruction the Romantic themes of human pathos, uncontrollable force, and emotional extremes. The emphasis on military brutality in many Oriental subjects by Western artists reflects ongoing conflicts throughout the century: the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), the conquest of Algeria by the French in the 1830s, and the Crimean War (1853–56).While many Europeans relied on published travelogues and officially sanctioned literature like the Description de l’Égypte for their impressions of the Near East, many artists, including Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856), Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860), and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), made one or more journeys to the region. Genre painting, the prevalent form of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by artists’ direct experience of everyday life in Near Eastern cities and settlements. Gérôme popularized the theme of the bashi-bazouk, or Turkish mercenary soldier, often depicted in routine activities or at leisure, as in a canvas by Charles Bargue (1825/26–1883). For Decamps, whose late career was shaped by the year he spent in Asia Minor (1828–29), depictions of military life elevated genre subjects to the grandeur of history painting. These artists and their contemporaries also produced scenes of quiet domesticity, maternity—as in Chassériau’s Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine —and religious piety, seen in Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque.Occasionally, the Near Eastern setting provided a backdrop for religious works with Christian themes. This approach appealed particularly to British artists, as the explicitness of detail encouraged in the Orientalist style upheld the Protestant necessity for iconographic clarity and fidelity to nature in religious art. From his sojourn in Palestine in the 1850s, William Holman Hunt produced paintings such as The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (1854–55; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), which uses an Orientalist setting, and The Scapegoat (1854–55; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), a Christian allegory set in the Palestinian landscape.Some of the most popular Orientalist genre scenes—and the ones most influential in shaping Western aesthetics—depict harems. Probably denied entrance to authentic seraglios, male artists relied largely on hearsay and imagination, populating opulently decorated interiors with luxuriant odalisques, or female slaves or concubines (many with Western features), reclining in the nude or in Oriental dress. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) never traveled to the East but used the harem setting to conjure an erotic ideal in his voluptuous odalisques. Beyond their implicit eroticism, harem scenes evoked a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation to which many Westerners aspired. The taste for Orientalism further manifested itself in Eastern architectural motifs, furniture, decorative arts, and textiles, which were increasingly sought after by a European elite. Proponents of the Aesthetic movement in Great Britain (1860s–80s), who collectively advocated an aesthetic of beauty for its own sake and valued form over content in art, took particular inspiration from Oriental interiors. This taste is exemplified in the Arab Hall (1877–79) in the London home of artist Frederic Leighton (1830–1896): glittering with mosaic tiles collected from Leighton’s journeys to the East, it served as a gathering place for like-minded aesthetes.The potency of Orientalist images remained undiminished for many artists into the twentieth century, including Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom took up Orientalist themes.
Price: 2750 USD
Location: Orange, California
End Time: 2024-11-15T21:26:36.000Z
Shipping Cost: 45 USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Artist: Unknown
Unit of Sale: Single Piece
Size: Large
Signed: No
Period: Art Deco (1920-1940)
Material: Canvas, Oil
Region of Origin: California, USA
Framing: Unframed
Subject: Community Life, Costumes, Dancing, Figures, Ladies, Love, Musical Instruments, Plants, Silhouettes, Still Life, Women, Arabia
Type: Painting
Year of Production: 1920
Original/Licensed Reproduction: Original
Item Height: 51 3/4 in
Style: Art Nouveau, Figurative Art, Islamic, Portraiture, Orientalism
Theme: Architecture, Art, Cities & Towns, Continents & Countries, Cultures & Ethnicities, Dance, Domestic & Family Life, Events & Festivals, Famous Places, Fashion, Food & Drink, History, Hobbies & Leisure, Music, People, Portrait, Royalty, Social History
Features: One of a Kind (OOAK)
Production Technique: Oil Painting
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Handmade: Yes
Item Width: 70 in
Time Period Produced: 1925-1949
