Museo Carmen Thyssen

In collaboration with:

European colonial expansion in northern Africa in the 1800s encouraged many artists, especially French and Spanish, to travel to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Their depictions of these countries’ landscapes, customs and people gave rise to what became known as Orientalist painting. This genre, with a personality of its own in 19th-century art and a concern with light, colour and minute detail, was keenly embraced by great masters such as Eugène Delacroix and Mariano Fortuny.

The popularity travel literature enjoyed at the time, the desire for new subject matter, and an adventurous, restless spirit led many artists to flee from the modern civilisation ushered in by the industrial revolution in search of an ideal, dreamed-of paradise, which they portrayed in their works by inventing an exotic, alluring Orient. The settings of this universe – a mixture of real-life observation and fantasy – were, however, places such as Granada or the Maghreb, which were decidedly un-Oriental but easier to reach.

This exhibition explores the lands, everyday life and faces of the inhabitants of the destinations for bourgeois westerners’ escapist fantasies, which were reflected in Spanish art of the second half of the 19th century by Fortuny, Lameyer, Fabrés, Tapiró and many other artists. Their versions of this theme are accompanied by several examples by their French contemporaries Delacroix, Benjamin-Constant and Dehodencq, which show the link between the foremost practitioners of this genre in both countries.

Image: Francesc Masriera. Muchacha mora, c. 1889. Colección particular