Bjoern Hartmann

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, a growing preoccupation with the perceived exoticism of the Orient, the geographical area equivalent to contemporary notions of Northern Africa and the Near East, emerged in France and other Western countries. While the Oriental Other had fascinated Europeans for centuries, a distinctive confluence of political events, aesthetic tastes and scientific developments created an environment that uniquely enabled and encouraged discourse on the Oriental in artistic and intellectual circles. Critical art history has emphasized the fact that such discourse never takes place in a vacuum instead, it is inextricably bound to dominant societal ideas and practices. In this exposition, the manifestations of these notions, particularly the early French colonialist ideology of the 1830s, will be investigated through the paintings of Eugène Delacroix. Though not a pioneer of depicting the Orient, Delacroix was among the first artists in the nineteenth century to travel to Northern Africa and paint from personal experience. He was thus in the position of having had first-hand encounters with two different cultures – French and Moroccan. But as much as this direct knowledge led to an arguably more realistic depiction of contemporary life in the Maghreb compared to his previous artistic flights of fancy, a critical comparison between two paintings linked to Delacroix’ visit to Morocco and two paintings of similar subject matter depicting domestic scenes will reveal that Delacroix’ images are in fact not objective depictions but instead shaped narratives informed and controlled by Western preconceptions and prejudices. The first pair to be examined consists of a Self Portrait from