Portraits From The Empire June 2005 - July 2008 Throughout the
ages, the Orient has attracted the interest of the West.
European intellectual and artists have been mesmerized since the
earliest times by this presumably mysterious and relatively
closed world. As a natural consequence, during various periods
many artists, either by travelling themselves or by travelling
in their imaginations, sought to discover the essence of the
Orient, and depicted or expressed in their works either the real
Orient or their own visions of it. The movement known as
Orientalism in European art, which appeared in conjunction with
the Romanticist movement of the 19th century, focused on the
East, primarily in the lands of the Ottoman Empire. Even long
before the rise of Orientalism in European art, many European
artists, fascinated by their first glimpses of the mysterious
East and by the Turquerie fashion which was the result of the
new relations with the Ottoman world. For nearly two hundred
years, starting from the 18th centur