Orientalist Aesthetics_ Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 ( PDFDrive )

4 Orientalists
in the Public Eye

T he question of the Orient is no less vast, sweeping, dense, and tentacular in painting than
in politics.”1 So wrote the veteran observer of Orientalist art Arsène Alexandre of the last
great Salon of the Orientalists held before World War I. Alexandre ’s gloss on the clash
of values in the thousand works on display, by analogy with the Eastern question in politics, is more
colorful than convincing. Orientalists might depict a vast sweep of peoples and places, but their work
did not have a comparable diversity of style or message. Critiques of imperial expansion, frequent
in French politics, had no real counterpart in painting. One could argue that all Orientalist art by Eu-
ropeans tacitly endorsed the colonial order, or at least instrumentalized it—there was virtually no
anticolonial painting before the historical reconstructions of Mohammed Racim in the 1920s. As we
have seen, preservationist convictions led many European artists to produce nostalgic images of East-
ern places and cultures as pristine. Painting failed to represent the scenes that anticolonial literature
in France might lead us to expect—of the social disruption or architectural vandalism brought by
the French colonists. Such imagery was abundant in the lithographic cartoons of the satirical publi-
cation L’Assiette au beurre around 1900,2 but it was not the province of the “high” art of painting,
which remained resistant to determinate political interpretations.

79

figure 33 Alexandre Lunois, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters,
oil on canvas, 1899.

80

Anticolonial politics in France, however, had already impinged on the criticism of Orientalist art
in the nineteenth century and continued to do so into the high modern period. In that arena the com-
plex play of opinion is less ambiguous, though disapproval of the project of Orientalism can trans-
late into negative judgments of the work on apparently aesthetic grounds. A full spectrum of critical
opinion is available in the dozens of reviews of the Orientalist Salons in specialist journals and daily
newspapers. I have consulted some fifty reviews in two dozen publications for this discussion—a
number indicating both interest in the Orientalists and the vitality of the publications, mainstream
as well as avant-garde, reviewing art exhibitions.

The scheduling of the Orientalists’ Salons early in February established a regular, reliable time
slot for critics and public alike. Posters like those of Alexandre Lunois were made to publicize the
exhibition (Fig. 33). It took place each year well before the major spring Salons and seemed to some
critics a welcome relief from the midwinter gloom and bad weather of Paris: “What a shame that a
little of the southern sun retained in the frames of Misses Mortstadt, Karpelès, or Ravlin . . . does
not fall upon the visitor in this icy half-light!”3 What appears a trivial motif of criticism continued
to underline one reason for painting the exotic: l’hivernage, or winter tourism. The modern tourist,
then as today, left Paris for southern climes to seek relief from the cold, as the seasonal rhythms of
work allowed. As in the case of Renoir, pneumonia and tuberculosis, common pulmonary maladies
at the time that were aggravated by smoggy urban winters, provided another incentive for the well-
to-do to flee south.4 Orientalist paintings in the exhibitions (like color posters of palm-lined beaches
today) opened up images of a therapeutic, prophylactic space, ripe for imaginative occupancy and
purchase.

The enticement of the exotic was not the only reason the society’s exhibitions were welcomed by
the mainstream art press. The repeated praise of Léonce Bénédite ’s “happy initiative” makes it clear
that his institutional prestige guaranteed coverage, particularly in the semiofficial weeklies of art world
information and reviews, the Chronique des arts et de la curiosité and the Bulletin de l’art ancien et mo-
derne. The Chronique des arts gave the most detailed coverage of the Orientalist Painters’ activities,
announcing their exhibitions in advance, reviewing them at length, and expounding the curatorial
program with such sympathy that Bénédite (himself a regular contributor) must have maintained
close contact with the editors-in-chief, Louis Gonse (to 1902) and Roger Marx (1902 to 1913). The
Chronique’s support is also unsurprising given the assistance the society received from the Ministry
of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and the Ministry of the Colonies.

Thus when the society exported an exhibit of Orientalists to Tunisia in 1897, the Chronique trum-
peted the “avowed colonial propaganda” undertaken by the “artists, explorers, and functionaries who
compose its committee.”5 A similar equanimity greeted the program in the Bulletin de l’art and jour-
nals like Larousse ’s weekly Revue encyclopédique or the liberal daily Gil Blas. The procolonial tenor

Orientalists in the Public Eye 81

of such discussions extended to defining the Orientalist artist: “Orientalists are a particular species
of painter. In them, the artist is doubled with an explorer. They yearn for wide-open spaces, because
these not only provide subjects for painting but also satisfy a great need for action. Orientalists get
bored in Paris. They return there from time to time to kiss their relations, care for their fever, and
buy up paint tubes, and they quickly set o¤ again.”6 This picture of pith-helmet pompiers (academic
artists) accords with what we know of the hardier painter travelers of the society, whose excursions
to the colonies became more frequent and more far-reaching as government funding became avail-
able to them.

From Cliché to Clichy

Given the opposition to the colonial project among writers with left-leaning and socialist beliefs,
cynical responses to the Orientalist Painters inevitably appeared in the art press. In the tradition of
those critics of Orientalism Castagnary and Duranty, some of the most interesting writing about
the society was negative. The salonniers of La Plume, La Revue blanche, Le Mercure de France, and
Gil Blas—young poets, novelists, and critics more than art world functionaries or scholars—found
reason to scorn an art closer to academic realism than to the movements they supported, from sym-
bolist to cubist.7 A symptomatic voice was that of Thadée Natanson, founder-editor of the Revue
blanche: “At this exhibition of an Orient that is always the same in its four or five expressions of an
exotic decor—tiresome and tired out, more superficial than energetic, more gaudy than luminous,
indeed tawdry—there are some adorable Persian miniatures. They’ve brought together the works
of Orientalists—an ugly word, and what does it mean? Can a painter be an Orientalist? . . . They’ve
announced that the society presided over by M. Bénédite is going o¤ to exhibit in the Orient. That
will be revenge for you.”8 Natanson is wittily malicious: the word “Orientalist” is an absurdity, the
paintings are garish and banal. Among the works on view, only the aesthetic products of the Orient
itself, the “adorable Persian miniatures,” are valid artistically.

The repetitious character of Orientalist painting is something many critics had cause to regret.
Baudelaire, half a century earlier, had expanded the idea of the visually conventional into two criti-
cal categories, the chic and the poncif. He associated both of them with the sometime Orientalist and
military painter Horace Vernet.9 The chic for Baudelaire signified the disappearance of a sense of na-
ture and the model and a reliance on memorized formulas that, when applied to gestures and ex-
pressions, quickly became banal. The many new little Salons ran the risk of the poncif by bringing
together works of similar theme. For a critic like André Fontainas, who at Le Mercure de France was
one of Cézanne ’s most vocal supporters, the poncif seemed endemic to painting by the Orientalist
Painters: “Nowhere better than at the annual exhibitions of the Orientalists is the odium of a con-
ventional, banal, and monotonous picturesque revealed.” This exotic poncif di¤ered little from the

82 Orientalists in the Public Eye

regional: “It is as easy to do the oriental as to do the Breton, and these days both recipes are within
anyone ’s reach.”10

Fontainas refers here to a movement counted as exotic in mainland France: Bretonism, the depic-
tion of peasants and fisherfolk by French and foreign painters working at the artists’ colonies of Brit-
tany. A commonplace from the 1880s, Gauguin’s School of Pont-Aven is only the best-known man-
ifestation of the movement.11 Charles Cottet, Dinet’s famous friend, exemplified the parallel between
Bretonism and Orientalism. Cottet was the popular painter of the difficult lives of the fishermen and
the women of the Brittany coast, which he rendered in broad-brushed forms and lugubrious colors
suited to Breton desolation and bereavement. Typical Cottet images include monumental figures of
women draped in gray, waiting anxiously for their men to return from sea, burials in cli¤-top ceme-
teries, and Brittany harbors at twilight (Fig. 34). Cottet combined such sentimentality with skillful
plays of light on distant Atlantic waves or the brightening of an evening cloudscape.

He moved with a curious ease from such scenes to studies of heavily draped Egyptian peasant
women on the banks of the Nile, and their North African counterparts in Algeria. A representative
work is Fellah Women (Femmes Fellahs, Fig. 35), where Cottet concentrates on the silhouettes of
women clad and veiled from head to toe in black, wandering through a barren cemetery. He makes
no concessions to femininity by revealing curvaceous forms, as Belly does in his water carriers by
the Nile or even Guillaumet in The Seghia, Biskra (see Fig. 20). The dour colors, dun browns and
grays, convey the unrelenting harshness of the landscape, in which Cottet poses his women of an-
other culture as sphinx-like, the secret of their appearance and of their lives held close about them
like the harsh cloth in which they are swathed.

Cottet sometimes ran afoul of the precept of truth to Oriental conditions of light: some critics
felt that in transporting his sepia and ash gray palette to Egypt he “Bretonized” both the fellah women
and the Oriental landscape.12 But he was often exempted from the complaint of conventionality lev-
eled at the Orientalist Painters just because of the distinctive and personal manner apparent in his
art. Formulaic work failed to count as art according to then current criteria. By the late nineteenth
century for the majority of critics (if not the public) mere imitation, no matter how exacting, was
not sufficient to constitute the work of art. What was needed was a particle of individual, subjective
self, an emotional content, an individual perception. The definition Emile Zola had given in 1867 of
the work of art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” still guided the thinking of many
critics. And more than one review of the Orientalists alluded to another of Zola’s maxims: “What I
seek in a work of art . . . is a man.”

Félicien Fagus of the La Revue blanche compared the Orientalists’ pictures unfavorably with those
of Monet and Sisley, each of which incarnates a specific time and place. In the Orientalists he found
only the impersonal: “I did search for a man and I found one, but he was dead,” he wrote of the painter
Guillaumet, whose works were in Bénédite ’s retrospective exhibition.13 Fontainas’s appreciation of

Orientalists in the Public Eye 83

figure 34
Charles Cottet, Low Mass
in Winter, Brittany, oil on

canvas, 1902.

Cottet makes the point exactly: “Wherever he goes M. Cottet sees like a painter, without troubling
to conform to vain picturesque traditions that he proves wrong in some places and goes beyond in
others.”14 In the decade after 1910 similar arguments explain the considerable popularity of André
Suréda among postsymbolist critics like Gustave Kahn and Victor Barrucand.15 Suréda’s Fountain at
Tlemcen (Une fontaine à Tlemcen; see Plate 5) is indeed “rich in memory and imagination” (as Barru-
cand observed of the artist), with its visual reference to a famous Poussin in the Louvre, Rebecca and
Eliezer at the Well. That too was a parade of female beauty, but Suréda emphasized the decorative—
patterned textiles and juxtaposed limbs, silhouettes and negative spaces. Relief is leached out, and
flatness and the arabesque bring a certain level of abstraction to this agreeable modernizing version
of the Maghrebian scene (which postdates Matisse ’s less mellifluous, more challenging solutions).

The core group of Orientalists, by contrast, were academic realists who had a stake in accuracy.
Their painting fell prey to another charge—that it resembled what La Plume’s Henri Eon called “col-
ored photography.” That complaint had often been leveled against meticulous academicians like
Ernest Meissonnier and William Bouguereau in later-nineteenth-century debates.16 Yet photogra-
phy, colored or not, violated Bénédite ’s Fromentinian aesthetic, which sought to limit the docu-
mentation in painting and keep something of the generality and unity considered proper to the work
of art. That photography itself had no place in the Salons of the Orientalist Painters, even if certain
pictures seemed photographic to the critics, was confirmed in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts by Ary Re-

84 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 35
Charles Cottet, Fellah
Women, oil on canvas,
1894.

nan. A frequent contributor to the Gazette, Renan had studied painting in Gustave Moreau’s pro-
gressive studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which during the 1890s produced future modernist Ori-
entalists like Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Evenepoel, and René Piot. In Renan’s own body
of work, the symbolist thematics of Moreau alternate with landscape views made in the Middle East.

Renan’s long essay “La peinture orientaliste” is, along with Bénédite ’s own essays, this period’s
major contribution to the study of Orientalism. The paragraph Renan devoted to the role of pho-
tography in the Orient and its relation to painting is typically acute: “For remote countries whose
climate is unhealthy, the photograph remains the document par excellence. Soon the entire world will
have been photographed—of Norway or of Tahiti, of Mecca or Samarkand . . . there exists an
immense repertoire of irrefragable images. . . . It is in looking at the available photographs of the
Orient that one gets a melancholy reminder of the insipidity of this little school today. It has done
little more than color what appears on the retina, with a perfection analogous to that of the lens. It
cannot equal subjective truth.”17 Renan believed that weaker artists capitulated to photography by
approximating its means. At the same time, the photograph proves his contention that only a per-
sonal response, in which the Oriental scene is transfigured by “faith and enthusiasm,” retains valid-
ity as art.

If this painting of unmediated veracity was at one extreme, at the other was art too deliberately
staged or too artificial in its fakery of things seen. Henri Eon paired the o¤ense of “colored pho-

Orientalists in the Public Eye 85

tography” with the masquerade of Oriental props, a “veritable Orientalism of the bazaar even more
deplorable than the studio Orientalism dear to our fathers.”18 Bazaar Orientalism, arrived at on French
soil by trumpery, became a trope in the society’s discussions. Long-established trade links between
Europe and North Africa, the Middle East, and India had made the purchase of Eastern carpets, items
of clothing, cheap jewelry, and decorated furniture as much a feature of faddish fin-de-siècle life as
it is today, facilitating the task of the “studio Orientalist” living in mainland France. If one had nei-
ther the inclination nor the resources to travel abroad and collect items of costume on the spot (as a
painter like Gérôme or a writer like Pierre Loti had done on numerous occasions), one could pur-
chase them in the bazaars of great trading centers like Marseille, Bordeaux, or Paris or in regional
towns such as Nîmes, as Bénédite remembered it from his youth.

Many nevertheless believed that the procedure of the studio Orientalist was not in itself dishon-
orable, as the brilliant success of the odalisques by Ingres (that archetypal studio Orientalist) had
shown. For the critic Arsène Alexandre, who in 1896 had not yet been to the East and supposed the
same of eighty percent of visitors to Durand-Ruel’s, “The important thing is that the painting be
good. The Orient as imagined and painted by a great artist who may never have left his Montmartre
studio will be much more satisfactory than a true Orient brought home by a landscapist who is lit-
eral and dry.”19 Not far from Montmartre studios was the Place Clichy, and in Paris at the turn of
the century the shops established there served the bourgeoisie, artists in particular, as a bazaar. Home
decorators’ emporiums like Bacri Frères and Paul Argand’s Magasins de la Place Clichy had already
shown their centrality to the Orientalist fad by advertising at and exhibiting in the 1893 Muslim Art
Exhibition. But most critics associated the Place Clichy with faked exoticism—for example, Adolphe
Dervaux, in a gibe published in La Plume: “Don’t several of these Orientalists seem to be très Place
Clichy (carpets, furniture, new Metro station)?”20 The works were condemned because they failed
to convince as art—the Place Clichy became a figure for inauthentic experience or, worse, for an il-
lusion that seems inauthentic (unlike what Alexandre ’s masterly studio Orientalist produced). One
writer even suggests that the Oriental bibelots from the French bazaars were not to be trusted: it was
all too evident that they were made in Parisian sweatshops.21 Paintings purporting to depict scenes
never observed, with copies of dubious import goods as props to the illusion—from such Oriental-
ist simulacra all authenticity had been expelled, like air from a vacuum pump.

For the veteran reporter of the fauve and cubist avant-gardes Louis Vauxcelles, the Orientalist
Painters failed to match the expectations he drew from the poetry of Baudelaire: “Don’t lay too much
store by that magic word ‘Orientalists,’ in hopes of making one of those prestigious promenades in
the land of the sun described in the divine verses of the “Invitation au voyage.” Nothing is more gloomy,
more dreary, less evocative. . . . It’s as if these ladies and gentlemen have only ventured from their
studios in the Batignolles to go and dream in front of the billboards of Place Clichy stores.” But Vaux-
celles concedes that such an excursion from the fashionable Batignolles artists’ quarter to the clichés

86 Orientalists in the Public Eye

of Clichy to procure the requisite moment of inspiration is enough to ensure the pictures’ “lively
success” among the sedentary public: “Doubtless there is nothing so suggestive as a casbah or some
Cambodian dancers for the walls of your bourgeois dining room.”22

Such comments posit a gulf in taste and understanding between the middle-class public and the
symbolist writers who constituted, for the most part, the corps of avant-garde critics. But symbolist
artists had no automatic antipathy to the Orientalist enterprise. Gustave Moreau had long been in-
terested in the ancient East, in the art and myth of Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as well as In-
dia and Persia. His paintings on Greek mythological themes had an “oriental” insistence on visual
extravagance. In his biblical images, like the celebrated Dance of Salome (Danse de Salomé; UCLA
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), he developed an aesthetic in which a love of syncretic Eastern re-
ligion, profuse ornament, and flashing colors creates a highly personal conception of the East.

Although Moreau was not a traveler, at least two noted Algerian-born symbolists of the 1890s,
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer and Armand Point, did show regularly at the Orientalist Painters. The land-
scapist Point (who had organized the 1889 Algerian pavilion’s exhibition) turned to esoteric sym-
bolist subject matter after settling in France. The Paris-based Lévy-Dhurmer began treating East-
ern scenes with great frequency after 1900, returning regularly to Algeria and Morocco over a
thirty-year period. His chosen medium was pastel, whose pale, crumbling colors uniquely suited the
atmosphere of lyrical introspection he attained in his best works. Most of those were based on visual
notes gathered on his travels, but he composed them back in the studio. Lévy-Dhurmer’s Evening
Promenade, Morocco (Promenade du soir; private collection) is an image of womanhood exceptional
among Orientalist paintings in that it both respects the traditional veil of the North African woman
and plays upon that covering up of the visage to develop an aura of mysterious beauty (Fig. 36). As
authors from Renoir to Loti had pointed out, the covering of the body and head only gave more force
to the expression of the eyes. Several of Lévy-Dhurmer’s pastel portraits also succeed in escaping
the stereotype to establish a more intimate rapport with the sitter than had been visible in, for exam-
ple, Renoir’s hastily drawn Algerian figures. Lévy-Dhurmer’s Moroccan (Le Marocain; Musée Na-
tional des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris) places its subject before what looks like a backdrop of
the holy city of Moulay-Idriss, outside Fez.23 The artist had used the device of placing writers be-
fore the city they wrote about in such portraits as that of the poet Georges Rodenbach (seen before
the canals of Bruges he evoked in his Bruges-la-morte of 1892). More pertinent is the image of Pierre
Loti (Fig. 37), starry-eyed and distinctly beautified, sporting his best Turkish moustaches, before a
backdrop of the waters of Constantinople at night. (The scene recalls the love boat in his famous
novel Aziyadé.) If the idea of portraits attached to places obtains here too, the beautiful floating face
and robed bust of this Moroccan youth are those of a scholar or artist connected with the religious
zone of Moulay-Idriss housing the tomb of the saint, a mosque, and Koranic schools.

The third prominent symbolist (even postsymbolist) associate of the Orientalist Painters was Emile

Orientalists in the Public Eye 87

figure 36
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer,

Evening Promenade,
Morocco, oil on canvas,

ca. 1930.
figure 37
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer,
Portrait of Pierre Loti,
“Phantom of the Orient,”
pastel, 1896.

88

Bernard, famous in the history of modernism as Gauguin’s collaborator in founding the School of
Pont-Aven. Doubtless following the example of Gauguin, he fled France in 1893 for Cairo, where
for the next decade he lived the life of an Arabophile cosmopolitan gentleman.24 Bernard’s painting
there began with a Pont-Aven primitivist reinterpretation of the Egyptian fellah. In early Egyptian
pen-and-watercolor drawings like Women at Market (Femmes au marché), these long-robed agricul-
tural workers are flattened forms rendered in radically simplified pen outlines, with no attempt at
modeling. In a more sustained canvas like Arab Festival (Fête arabe) the visual treatment owes some-
thing to Bernard’s cloisonnist handling of fieldworkers in Brittany (making him a second artist to
“Bretonize the fellah”), passed through the screen of Tuscan primitives he had admired in Italy in
1893. After 1898, however, partly as a result of his visits to Italy and a growing disa¤ection with the
modernist project, Bernard developed an idiosyncratic rendering based on his admiration for the
Venetian old masters Tintoretto and Veronese. The style of a canvas like The Hashish Smoker (La
fumeuse de hachisch) (purchased by Bénédite for the Luxembourg in 1902) only superficially resem-
bles contemporary academic realism. At Bernard’s successful one-man show at Vollard’s in 1901, the
critic for L’Ermitage distinguished the artist’s new work from that of a literalist like Dinet: “He knows
too well the artistic value of the trompe l’oeil, however remarkable, of a Dinet. More than ever he
interprets, but without his [former] tendency to excess. He aims at being noble, simple . . . austere
and harmonious.”25

Bernard’s sepia-toned, smoky palette persists in his Cairo Merchants (Les marchands du Caire), con-
trasting with the brilliant hues common to both Gérôme-school Orientalism and impressionist painter
travelers (Fig. 38). The frieze-like spatial organization of this very large canvas shows, in the care
exercised in rendering each static figure, an admiration for the decorative approach of quattrocento
and even Byzantine muralists. But the praise Bernard received for his Orientalist works is an indica-
tion of his declining reputation with the avant-garde; for Julius Meier-Graefe, the Luxembourg
Hashish Smoker “justifies Gauguin’s severe prophecy that Bernard would yet end with Benjamin Con-
stant.”26 Despite undertaking an exotic expatriation comparable to Gauguin’s, Bernard renounced
the possibility of pioneering an equivalent modernist Orientalism.

One thing that does link Bernard to more academic Orientalist painters is his general avoidance
of literary themes in the Egyptian paintings. Given the importance of literary references in critical
discussions of Orientalist art, it is surprising that so few Orientalists who traveled made such imag-
inative forays. Bénédite and Ary Renan delighted in erudite citations of eighteenth-century Orien-
talist writers, and symbolist critics evoked such key sources in the culture of exoticism as Baudelaire ’s
poems, Flaubert’s novels and stories, and the Thousand and One Nights, the last not an Orientalist
composition but a classic of Arabic literature that had been available in French since Galand trans-
lated it about 1710. The so-called Arabian Nights had recently been given new currency in a transla-
tion by the influential Arabist Dr. Joseph Mardrus, serialized in La Revue blanche. When such texts

Orientalists in the Public Eye 89

figure 38
Emile Bernard,
Cairo Merchants, oil
on canvas, 1900.

did engender Orientalist art, it was usually paintings or sculptures illustrating specific figures.27
Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, for example, inspired the hieratic bronze Salammbô and Mathô (Salammbô
et Mathô) by the sculptor Théodore Rivière (Fig. 39) and Victor Prouvé’s rampant naked figure of
the Carthaginian queen in a cartouche of arabesques.

For some critics the very richness of the literary Orient and the images it nourished in the recep-
tive mind told against the modern school of painting. So Adolphe Dervaux of La Plume could expostu-
late: “Where is the Orient of the Sanctuaires of Edouard Schuré, the Orient of Marco Polo, of Lamar-
tine; where is . . . the Orient of [Hugo’s] Orientales, that of Byron, of Lord Lytton, of Loti? . . . These
Grand Palais Orientalists . . . paint Gabon, Spain, Venice, and Palermo . . . but rarely the Orient. It
is ordinary, mediocre, even bad image making.”28

There is a discrepancy between the romantic aspiration for the Orient evinced here and the real-

90 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 39
Théodore Rivière,
Salammbô and Mathô,
bronze, 1895.

ity of the prosaic painting-and-travel movement in colonialist France. Indeed the French term art
colonial, in regular use from about 1920, perhaps more accurately captures the tenor of late Orien-
talist painting. Ary Renan had not defined the Orientalist movement in thematic terms but rather in
terms of political geography. For him the Orient encompassed “a large part of Asia and the whole
northern coast of Africa. . . . This vague word is thus defined quite clearly by the frontiers of the
ancient Muslim conquests.”29 Other critics realized that the society itself o¤ered a loose definition of
Orientalism in the array of paintings it displayed. They read o¤ the geographical boundaries of the
East with a litany of place-names: “For these painters the Orient begins to the east of Paris and ra-
diates wherever the warm sun shines intensely. The Basque country and Venice are both part of it.”30
Scenes from Venice and Spain were indeed common at the Orientalist Painters, almost as if any south-
ern country that was not France was by definition exotic and could be posed as the Other.

Orientalists in the Public Eye 91

Dinet and the Ethnographic Sensibility

If one painter and one issue typified the Society of French Orientalist Painters in the public mind, they
would be Etienne Dinet and the ethnographic sensibility. Dinet was a founding member of the soci-
ety and a close friend of Léonce Bénédite ’s. He exhibited more works, more frequently at the Salon
than any other Orientalist, participating without fail every year until 1914, and again in the sporadic
exhibitions of the 1920s. However one judges the aesthetic limitations of Dinet’s art (and many crit-
ics of his day were unhappy about its literality, brazen color, and frequent mawkishness), his han-
dling of the ethnographic was something to be applauded. Arsène Alexandre, for example, placed a
premium on studies of “scènes et types,” “moeurs,” and “races” in art because of their inherent diffi-
culty. Other painters might be accused of failing to characterize a people correctly, but not Dinet.
His long years in the Berber community at Bou-Saâda had given his representations incontrovert-
ible authority, discernible even to those who may not have known his personal history: “What most
of the Orientalists lack . . . is a knowledge of their subject other than its surface and decor. M. Dinet
has completely renewed the genre by his intimate knowledge of Arab life.”31

Few visual or literary artists who traveled in the late nineteenth century were not sensitized to
ethnographic issues, already present in the criticism of Gautier and Fromentin. By that time the
philosopher Hippolyte Taine ’s use of the material determinants of “race, milieu, and moment” to
assess culture had widespread currency. Taine held that the physical environment in which a people
lived had a fundamental impact on its characteristics and way of life. Not every account of race and
culture was informed by the evaluative hierarchies of being exemplified by the racist taxonomies of
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau.32 There was also a more liberal curiosity about the specificity of other
peoples that was common to late-nineteenth-century traveling artists of varying aesthetic stripe, from
a symbolist like Gauguin in Tahiti to an arch-realist like Dinet in Algeria. The two artists can be use-
fully compared, not least because each gradually shifted alliance from French metropolitan culture
to the culture and cause of the indigenous. After a half-decade in Oceania, Gauguin changed his stance
on the French colonial presence from complicity in exploiting the indigenous to opposition.33 Dinet’s
course was similar, except that he has not been subject to strong charges of exploitation, and he “went
native” in a far more thoroughgoing sense (and for a much longer time) than Gauguin.

A brief selection of religious and mystical subjects by each artist brings out their dissimilar con-
ceptions of the substance of cultural and ethnic di¤erence. Gauguin’s Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee,
Mary, Fig. 40) can be seen as symptomatic of the artist’s attempts to grasp the shifting context of re-
ligious belief in colonial Tahiti in the 1890s.34 The picture ’s Christian iconography is evident, even
if it takes the doctrinally muddled form of the mission Catholicism of Papeete and surrounding set-
tlements. Varying the dusky Christs of Bibles for native consumption, Gauguin o¤ers a vision of
Tahiti as a holy land where an angel annunciate appears to an indigenous Mary (who is already hold-
ing a child, confusing the Gospel version of events). This work and others postulate Tahiti as a Gar-

92 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 40
Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana
Maria (We Greet Thee,
Mary), oil on canvas,
1891.

den of Eden in which the luxuriance of vegetation and fruit matched that of the inhabitants’ bodies
in a time before the birth of sexual shame. (Gauguin’s own letters encourage that reading.)

Yet if Gauguin imposed Christianizing presuppositions on the Tahitian scene, he was also fasci-
nated by what can be called an ethnography of Tahitian religion. His illustrated manuscript Ancien
culte mahorie claimed to recount the vestiges of pre-Christian religion in the islands, transcribed from
conversations with his teenage Tahitian girlfriend. Yet as is well known, the book in large part was

Orientalists in the Public Eye 93

copied out from Jacques-Antoine van Moerenhout’s 1837 book Voyage aux îles du grand océan. Be-
hind Gauguin’s creative subterfuge was an impulse to collect those “precious fragments . . . of the
great national patrimony” (as Léonce Bénédite called them) constituting the “civilization, customs,
history, and arts” of indigenous races in the colonies.35 In certain related paintings, such as the well-
known Mana’o tupapa’u (The Specter Watches Over Her; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Gau-
guin evoked, not the syncretic Christian beliefs of contemporary Tahiti, but what he believed was
the burden of pre-Christian superstition among the young women of his acquaintance. His visual
language is creative and allegorical, as he improbably places a spirit figure inside the sleeping girl’s
room. True to his symbolism, he may have expected the picture’s imagery and ine¤able color to evoke
sensations of dread equivalent to the feelings he attributed to the frightened girl on the occasion that
inspired the picture. As Stephen Eisenman observes somewhat optimistically of Gauguin, “To call
him an ethnographer is not quite right, for it implies the passive stance of a spectator and not the ac-
tive perspective of the modern artist who understands that cultural traditions are made and remade
in the present, not just recovered unchanged from the past.”36

Dinet made numerous paintings treating the religious life of the southern Algerian oases, basing
them on a knowledge of the religious practices of the region much more precise than Gauguin’s:
Dinet, after all, converted to Islam. As paintings his works, however, eschew the allegory almost al-
ways present when Gauguin paints a religious subject. The ethnography in Dinet’s works is at once
more exact, and the formulation more literal. One series of small canvases depicts di¤erent phases
of prayer in the desert Muslims’ religious observance, from Er Rakâa, or Inclination and Es Soujoud,
or Prostration to Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la prière: “At Tahia,” Fig. 41).37
It is significant that such works, and related scenes of daily life in a religious context, illustrated Dinet’s
popular book La vie de Mohammed, prophète d’Allah. This was the third in a series of texts (the best-
known of which is Tableaux de la vie arabe, 1908) to use painted illustrations to accompany texts writ-
ten by Sliman ben Ibrahim. The Vie du prophète was a substantial work of scholarship and deliber-
ate proselytizing, written in French and drawing on authorized Arabic sources. Published in 1918 as
a deluxe folio, the book contains thirty color plates reproducing Dinet’s oils, “scenes from the daily
life of Muslims plus the holy places of Islam.”38 The publication context explains the paintings’ di-
dacticism, if not their religious proselytizing.

Another series of Dinet’s canvases treats important moments in the Islamic calandar. Dinet painted
several versions of the subject of his Crescent Moon (Le croissant), in which a group of Algerian men
and boys descry for the first time the moon that announces the end of the fast of Ramadan.39 As Dinet
formalized his conversion to Islam (around 1913), an increasing number of his works treated such
themes, just as his suprisingly erotic series of teenaged Berber girls seen bathing or frolicking on the
banks of the oued, or stream, petered out. A last set of small canvases depict the sacred sites of Cairo,
Mecca, and Medina, with bird’s-eye views of the annual mass pilgrimage. These were the illustra-

94 Orientalists in the Public Eye

tions Dinet prepared for his final book, Pélerinage à la Maison Sacrée d’Allah, published in the year
following his own hadj to Mecca and death soon after.40

A major independent composition of 1900 such as The Son of a Holy M’rabeth (Le fils d’un saint
M’rabeth, Fig. 42) achieves its impact by taking an image of strong religious feeling (Delacroix had
similarly inserted one into the iconography of Orientalism with his Fanatics of Tangiers [Les convul-
sionnaires de Tanger] of 1838) and attempting to release it from the prejudice of incomprehensibility.
Here we see a scene of religious exaltation in the traditional life of certain Maghrebian communi-
ties, in which the veneration of holy men, or marabouts, was a distinctive element of Islamic prac-
tice. The visual staging is undeniably impressive, the faces and hands of the devotees emerging from
a mass of bone-colored burnouses. Above that roiling crowd, the child of the saint sits imperturbably,
outlined against a dark doorway. The serenity of his visage contrasts both with those of his implor-
ing admirers and with the ferocious expression of the great black man who bears him, forcing a path
through the people. A key to the image is provided in a text of Dinet and Sliman, who like Gauguin
for Mana’o tupapa’u but with greater assurance, describe the work, giving it an aural dimension (tran-
scribing the violent imprecations of the child’s bearer to the faithful) and recounting its theology for
their French audience: “An elevated pole around which souls gravitate like stars, the holy man is called
M’rabeth, that is ‘Attached One,’ because his heart is attached to the love of the Creator, to whom
he bears all hearts that the faithful submit to him. Men, women, old and young, rush toward this young
child, whose visage is nimbed by a crown of light; they surround him . . . hoping, through contact,
to enlighten their souls, which they cast his way and abandon to him entirely.”41

Clearly for Dinet such explanations were a kind of didactic obligation. They can be better un-
derstood in relation to the role of the ethnographic in Orientalist painting. Dinet’s approach seems
to defy the strictures of Fromentin, who had argued against tackling exotic subjects outside the lim-
its of beauty as the West conceived it. Bénédite, both an admirer of Fromentin and the arbiter of the
Orientalist Painters’ aesthetic, had a conflicted attitude toward ethnography and beauty. The conflict
was partly one of strategic positioning: in promoting the society, Bénédite relied on the authorita-
tive precedents of Fromentin, whose proscription of “documents,” for example, explains why the
Orientalists’ exhibitions excluded photography. (It was left out despite its importance in bringing im-
ages of the East to the European public, and the existence of distinguished bodies of photographic
work made in the Near East from the 1850s on.)

But the exclusion of photography did not prevent Bénédite ’s recognizing, once the society was
formed, the usefulness of ethnography in Orientalist painting. It could be politically expedient as
“propaganda” in favor of the French colonies. Bénédite ultimately professed impatience with Fro-
mentin’s “pusillanimous” scruples. The new painters, more empirically disposed, attempted to cap-
ture the very sights Fromentin had avoided, and with aesthetic success, for as Bénédite points out,
“The eye is an organ that quickly conforms to the habits one fosters in it.”42

Orientalists in the Public Eye 95

figure 41
Etienne Dinet, Imam

Leading the Prayer:
“At Tahia,” oil on

canvas, ca. 1921.

Etienne Dinet’s avatar Gustave Guillaumet had made a particular commitment to living in North
Africa and to transposing its image in the disinterested quotidian spirit of ethnographic study. Guil-
laumet “had seen and lived the daily life of the desert . . . in the douars or by the ksours, those small
sleepy settlements in the midst of oases that have the air of old Hebraic towns.” Unlike Chassériau
and Fromentin, whose images of women sought to inject a seductive poetry into their veiled exis-
tence, Guillaumet, for Bénédite, was true to the humdrum life of Kabyle housewives—the sound of
their mortars and pestles, the dexterity of girls decorating Kabyle pottery—even entering their houses
and “little by little penetrating the intimacy of their conjugal lives.”43 In short, Guillaumet was a re-
alist, domesticating the exotic in work that parallels the peasant paintings of his older friend Jean-
François Millet.

One function of ethnographic work was to capture for posterity the image of peoples threatened
by European encroachment.44 Gautier had already defended Orientalism in a Dehodencq painting
of Spanish Gypsies in these terms: “When this bizarre race—an emigration of the pariah tribes of
India—has disappeared, drowned by the invasion of civilization, it will be found again in its entirety,

96 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 42
Etienne Dinet,
The Son of a Holy
M’rabeth, oil on
canvas, 1900.

with its types, its gestures and its demeanor, in the picture of M. Dehodencq.”45 Such statements,
built on a concept of cultural and racial decline, manifested the insistent “colonial nostalgia” that
Chris Bongie has identified in the works of painters such as Gauguin and writers such as Victor Se-
galen and Loti who were active in French Oceania at the fin de siècle.46 Today we would reject such
theories, for two reasons. First, they overestimated the fragility of cultures and peoples, many of which
(like the Gypsies) have survived. Second, they privileged notions of a static “authentic” culture frozen
outside time, thereby relegating to degraded status the changing culture of indigenous people in dy-
namic situations of colonial exchange.47

Bénédite saw the decline of colonized peoples less as a Darwinian inevitability than as the result
of antagonism to cultural di¤erence and government policies of assimilation. Like the curator Georges
Marye in 1893, he was not beyond casting barbs at French colonial administrations and French colonists
for bringing about the destruction, not only of monuments, but of ways of life: “The union of the
races, which is not being achieved quickly enough for our politicians, is already too far advanced
from the point of view of art. The sadness of daily seeing the vestiges of these spectacles and cus-

Orientalists in the Public Eye 97

toms . . . disappearing under the egoistic brutality of our Western exploitation has given birth to the
desire to scrupulously note down . . . all of the color, poetry, strangeness, and seduction.”48 Such a
preservationist attitude, however sympathetic from the position of today’s multiculturalism, never-
theless has about it an element of romantic nostalgia (as well as a questionable insistence on “race”
as the actual currency of human di¤erence). But the wider collectivity of the Orientalist Painters
embraced it, making the salvage of such cultural riches part of its platform.

Dinet is exemplary in this sense, achieving unprecedented detail and apparent accuracy in his rep-
resentations of the Kabyle and Bedouin peoples of southern Algeria. In di¤ering degrees, both Dinet
and Gauguin represent that rare phenomenon, the artist who seemingly crosses over into the world
of the Other and draws on a privileged font of information. But Dinet went further than Gauguin,
identifying with the cause of the desert people whose language, faith, and home he adopted (even if
he retained the French language and kept an ancestral home at Héricy, outside Paris).49 Bénédite em-
broidered Dinet’s cross-cultural persona to the extent of writing that “his very physiognomy has
taken on the characteristics of a grand nomadic chief.”50

His interest fired by trips to North Africa in his early twenties, Dinet, trained by Bouguereau but
inspired by the influential peasant painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, began a life of regular visits to Al-
geria in the mid-1880s. Early on he studied Arabic with Paul Leroy at the Ecole des Langues Orien-
tales; around 1892 he received the support of Sliman ben Ibrahim, an essential figure in the Dinet
phenomenon. Sliman was a young Mozabite—emigrant from the wealthy Berber trading enclaves
of the M’Zab farther south—then resident in Bou-Saâda. He acted as the painter’s elevated “native
informant.” For Dinet, Sliman was willing to “collect the songs of the desert, explain the legends,
comment on the holy books, give the reasons for customs and costumes.” Sliman even e¤ected his
own cultural translation by becoming interested in painting, that “art which people present as for-
bidden.”51 Thus he could assist Dinet by arranging for Ouled-Naïl and other models to pose for him
and by ensuring the correctness of their gestures. On his regular trips to Paris with Dinet, Sliman
apparently became an assiduous visitor to the Louvre and the Luxembourg. As has been noted, he
was often present at the Orientalist Painters’ annual banquets and was evidently a symbol of cultural
authentication in his role as the society’s only indigenous correspondent.

Dinet painted at least two portraits of Sliman: one is a sensitive bust in honorific mode, showing
a beautiful three-quarter view of the Mozabite in burnous, silhouetted against desert hills with med-
als and prayer beads prominently displayed on his chest (see Fig. 27). A second shows Sliman bat-
tling the wind and sleet of a wintry Paris, head and shoulders bowed, his expression bleak as he
confronts the European elements near the fountain and the Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde
(Fig. 43). The choice of backdrop—a memorial to Napoleonic Egyptology that here symbolizes the
antiquity of Sliman’s continent—was surely deliberate. Dinet’s potent image of dépaysement, almost
exile, is virtually unique in Orientalist painting, situating a “traditional” Maghrebian, not in his own
element (as in the first portrait), but at the seat of metropolitan French power.

98 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 43
Etienne Dinet, Sliman ben
Ibrahim at the Place de la
Concorde, oil on canvas,
before 1908.

Because of his friendship with Sliman, Dinet’s art becomes a collaboration between an expert from
inside the target culture and an empathetic practitioner who reeducates himself along local lines: Dinet
“has become like an Arab, a cultivated Arab.”52 Without detailing here François Pouillon’s richly
studied history of Dinet’s life and exchanges with Sliman, one can comment briefly on the ethno-
graphic in several critical texts informed by the painter, but written by the Orientalists’ Bénédite.

One focus of these texts is gesture as a marker of ethnic identity. (Bénédite rarely noted more tra-
ditional racial and physiognomical typing.) Even in his account of Dinet’s early Salon canvas The
Snake Charmer (Le charmeur de vipères; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) in 1890 Bénédite
deployed ethnographic and luminary tropes equally in his discussion; in the painting one sees the pro-
nounced study of gesture and faces close-up that is a striking feature of Dinet’s art. In the market-

Orientalists in the Public Eye 99

place at Laghouat, wrote Bénédite, “a numerous group of Arabs, who have come from all points of
the desert, surround the old conjurer. Wrapped in their dirty white burnous . . . their eyes blinking
under the burning light that illuminates their copper faces strangely, they observe, with the most
varied expressions of indi¤erence . . . admiration or astonishment . . . the snake charmer, an old
fossil of bizarrely mixed blood, who makes bracelets and necklaces with his trained reptiles.”53

Such studies of physiognomy and expressive gesture, descending directly from academic princi-
ples Dinet would have learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, are taken to lev-
els uncharacteristic of late-nineteenth-century art. In his 1903 essay on Dinet, Bénédite recounts the
thinking of the artist himself who, living half his life in Paris and half in the desert, finds that the
quality of modern gesture has been modified, if not degraded, by “contact with the machine and by
the division of labor, not to mention secondary factors like the theater, public meetings, barracks,
taverns . . . where each individual in the crowd is an actor.” By contrast, among the people of the
Sahara, “where the patriarchal way of life has continued without interruption as if time stood still,”
one could find “the same attitudes, the same gestures, the same physiognomical expressions perpet-
uated through the centuries.”54

For an artist disenchanted with modernity, such a culture could form a treasure trove of visual re-
sources. A photograph of the artist painting on his terrace at Bou-Saâda shows how Dinet posed and
studied such scenes (Fig. 44). The subject, a man in the embrace of four Ouled-Naïl courtesans, is
reworked in several images, including a postcard that excludes the painter, and at least one canvas.55
The Ouled-Naïl (who are discussed more extensively in Chapter 7) were Berber tribespeople noto-
rious among Europeans for sending their younger women to work as socially sanctioned prostitutes
in oasis towns like Bou-Saâda and Biskra. Dinet specialized in detailed depictions of Ouled-Naïl
women, with their elaborate headdresses and encrusted jewelry (in which their earnings and thus
dowries were embodied).

Even when depicting the Ouled-Naïl engaged in their characteristic dances, Dinet approached the
subject so as to diminish the sexualized and venial aspect of their presence before an assumed (but
never depicted) European viewer. The men one sees in these love scenes are people from the same
group: Dinet e¤ectively romanticized social and sexual relations among his models at Bou-Saâda.
Other works of his treat scenes—sometimes mawkish, sometimes gritty with realism—of prosti-
tution, intoxication by drugs, estrangement of spouses, even the casting out of women and children.
More numerous, however, are oils in an elegiac mode. In “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute) (“La quesba”
[longue flûte de roseau]; see Plate 6), a young Ouled-Naïl woman in full regalia sits on a terrace at
dusk with her lover, gazing distractedly as she heeds the music of his flute. Her left hand catches her
transparent mauve veil in a gesture from the dance, while her right entwines with her partner’s and
rests gently on his knee in a gesture of simple a¤ection. In a similar if more energetic spirit, Spring
of Hearts (Le printemps des coeurs; private collection) embroiders the theme of desert love that runs

100 Orientalists in the Public Eye

figure 44
Dinet painting on his
terrace [at Bou-Saâda],
ca. 1925.

through Dinet’s book Tableaux de la vie arabe, which it illustrated. In his accompanying text Sliman
describes the love games of “striplings and damsels” on the banks of the oued among the oleander
groves. In a poetic mode the author invokes the mythic morning breeze that incites each pair of young
lovers visible in the picture in a di¤erent way. In the foreground, as a youth pushes forward to cover
his partner’s neck with kisses, “the girl, whose wrist is armed with a mass of sharp-pointed bracelets,
tries in vain to bring it down in anger upon her inseparable one.”56 Dinet’s cinematic, almost pho-
tojournalistic, approach is as far as possible from the disengaged reserve of fin-de-siècle aesthetics.
In thus personalizing human encounters among indigenous Algerians, Spring of Hearts exemplifies
the unique perspective Dinet gave to Orientalist painting.

The desert stories of Isabelle Eberhardt, exactly contemporary with Dinet’s works, are based more
on personal observation than on a weaving in and out of the folkloric. Eberhardt’s writing is terse
and stripped bare, whereas Dinet’s visuals are excessive and cloying. There are nevertheless certain
parities in their cross-cultural projects of finding sources for art. Eberhardt, fluent in Arabic and
dressed as a young religious male scholar, or tolba, for several years roamed the desert regions of
southern Algeria, observing traditional life and infiltrating religious confraternities. She married an
Algerian spahi, or indigenous regular in the French army, and earned a meager income from articles
and short stories she sent back to Algiers, where they were published in Victor Barrucand’s liberal
bilingual newspaper, L’Akhbar. Eberhardt’s cross-dressing as well as her cultural masquerade, and
the anticolonial tenor of some of her texts, led French authorities to judge her subversive. (She was

Orientalists in the Public Eye 101

expelled from Algeria at one point.) Eberhardt lived and died on the edge, killed by a flash flood in
1904, aged twenty-seven.57 In contrast, Dinet usually dressed as a Frenchman and maintained regu-
lar professional and social contacts with Paris, even if his later cohabitation with Sliman and his fam-
ily and, above all, his sincere conversion to Islam, led the French of Bou-Saâda to ostracize him.

The most interesting of all the conservative critics of new art at this time, Camille Mauclair, held
Dinet in special esteem, applauding his sound technique and probing drawing of the human figure.
He felt that Dinet’s handling of light, “bathing his figures in a sort of phosphoric glow,” surpassed
that of the impressionists. Mauclair recognized the psychic appeal that the life of Islam, “in its pride,
its barbaric luxury, its cruelty, and its immense melancholy” (as he put it), had for Dinet, who was
“magnetized” by its mystery.58 Yet for the critic, Dinet’s unparalleled investment in the life of the
desert peoples was not an end in itself but had a broader relevance in the face of an ever-expanding
colonial culture. “Later on,” Mauclair writes of Dinet’s canvases, “they will be incomparable refer-
ences, they will have fixed without the coldness of archaeology a civilization and a race called upon
to transform themselves to the point of travesty by the fatalities of a ‘modernism’ that is slowly killing
the Orient.”59

Such an estimate of Dinet’s future proved close to the mark. Bénédite already granted that Dinet
seemed to enjoy the approval of those he represented. In the Tableaux de la vie arabe, Bénédite claims
that Dinet not only has exceeded his predecessors’ comprehension of this people but has also un-
derstood them “as a native would have done.” Remarking the interest in Dinet’s work of the locals
of Bou-Saâda (the most intelligent of whom see it, he says, as an exaltation of the virtues of their
people and of Islam), he calls Dinet “the ‘Sheikh’ of the Orientalists.”60

However sophistic these claims, Dinet’s art, once it had been endorsed by Sliman’s texts, was more
than just tolerated by segments of the indigenous Algerian community. Dinet’s formal conversion to
Islam in 1913, his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1929, and the way the Arab community in Bou-Saâda in 1930
mourned him as El Hadj Nasr’Edine Dinet all bear this out. Dinet was mourned also by the colonial
authorities (including Governor-General Pierre Bordes, who gave the eulogy) as a symbol of cultural
coalescence in “la France musulmane.” His funeral at Bou-Saâda was attended by a throng of five
thousand people from desert and town. That ceremony was also a stage on which the elite of the Mus-
lim reform movement could proclaim the value for indigenous Algeria of this prestigious convert.61

So the argument for ethnographic Orientalist art comes full circle, from being anathema to Fro-
mentin, still concerned to maintain le beau, as understood by the European tradition, to being a site
of cultural value for a contemporary North African public. The art of scrupulous representation has
di¤erent uses and significance for di¤ering historical constituencies. The way North African, Saudi,
and other non-European buyers in today’s art market have embraced Dinet’s pictures shows they
have cultural currency as records of a way of life now transformed. In this new context, Dinet’s metic-
ulous constructions document pristine desert life for a non-European audience, some of whose fore-
bears they may even represent.62

102 Orientalists in the Public Eye

The reception of Dinet’s pictures makes it clear that there is no way to prescribe how pictures
may be read and used, particularly with the seismic shift of decolonization in North Africa. It is sur-
prising how many of the elements canvased by a range of art critics who viewed Orientalist art in
the annual Salons of the Orientalist Painters around 1900 still have currency. The skepticism and
lampooning of the work as clichéd or merely photographic still reverberates among older promod-
ernist critics, art historians, or exhibition goers who discount what they see as academic kitsch. The
favorable early critics, who endorsed the scientific, ethnographic, and indeed historical functions of
Orientalist art would have seen their predictions validated, but by the indigenous rather than the Eu-
ropean community. Chief among them was Léonce Bénédite, who emerges as a figure of consider-
able importance to the history of Orientalism, not only to the movement’s organization and aesthetics
(see Chapter 2), but also to its rhetoric, the construing of turn-of-the-century cultural politics, with
due recognition of the task of propaganda.

Focusing on the latter introduces a third element in the three chapters investigating the Society of
French Orientalist Painters and its diverse activities. Chapter 3 concerns the institution and its inter-
nal strategies of consolidation, and Chapter 4, the aesthetic and political debates generated in the an-
nual exhibitions held at the Durand-Ruel Galleries and then in the larger spaces of the Grand Palais.
But the explosion of activity that characterized the organization in its early years, 1895–1900, spun o¤
into much wider spheres and addressed a public so large it is hard to credit today. I refer to the uni-
versal and colonial exhibitions, whose role in relation to Orientalist visual arts I turn to in Chapter 5.

Orientalists in the Public Eye 103



5 Colonial Panoramania

T he universal expositions brought metropolitan and regional publics (as well as many for-
eign visitors) face-to-face with the French colonies through a complex array of represen-
tations. The best known are the colonial pavilions, elaborate temporary structures, each a
pastiche of traditional building styles in the colony. Nearly as familiar (touching as they do the his-
tory of anthropology as well as popular culture) are the native villages, where traditional temporary
dwellings—huts, tents, tepees—were sta¤ed by indigenous peoples brought from far-o¤ colonies.1

The insides of the colonial pavilions, however, are a little-examined sphere of visual art and spec-
tacle: the use of panoramas and dioramas, and collections of easel paintings to represent distant colo-
nial sites.2 The word “panoramania” in this chapter’s title was coined to describe the fashion for the
vast circular paintings that gave unprecedentedly accurate “all-embracing views” of places.3 Such
gigantic paintings, along with dioramas and tableaux vivants, proved among the most popular at-
tractions of the universal and colonial expositions. Orientalists harnessed all these forms of image
making, and the phrase “colonial panoramania” suggests the enthusiasm for such visual technolo-
gies, as pressed into service by colonial interests in fin-de-siècle France.

In propagating panoramania in the colonial sphere, the Society of French Orientalist Painters once

105

again proved a driving force, at least in the three expositions treated in this chapter: the 1900 Paris
Universal Exposition, the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille, and the 1907 National
Colonial Exposition at Nogent-sur-Marne. The society realized that its annual Salons were minor
events compared with the expositions—thirty-nine million people visited the 1900 Paris exposition
over its seven-month duration, for example.4 Anticipiating such success, the Orientalist Painters or-
ganized two separate exhibitions for 1900, and its members worked on murals for colonial pavilions
and on panoramas, dioramas, and other spectacular projects scattered about the colonial precinct.5

It is not surprising that the Society of French Orientalist Painters, formed as it was in the after-
math of the Fine Arts Room at the 1889 Algerian pavilion, came to specialize in assembling exhibi-
tions on request, providing a thematically appropriate veneer of colonial high art for expositions and
other displays. Léonce Bénédite, at the invitation of the premier cultural institute in French Tunisia,
the Institut de Carthage, in 1897, had taken an exhibition of one hundred pictures to that protec-
torate.6 The Orientalist Painters made painting as a means of cultural transfer their special province,
exploring the potential of murals, panoramas, and salonnets (or little Salons) of portable easel pic-
tures to communicate between nation and colonies.

Colonial Spectacle: Murals, Panoramas, Dioramas

In considering how the Ministry of the Colonies regulated the vast colonial precinct of the Trocadéro
Gardens in 1900 (Fig. 45), it is useful to draw upon the cultural theorist Tony Bennett’s idea of the
“exhibitionary complex.” Bennett distinguishes between official government displays at the exposi-
tions and popular attractions and assesses the interplay between those zones in a discursive as well as
material sense. “Initially,” Bennett writes, “these fair zones established themselves independently of
the official expositions and their organizing committees. The product of the initiative of popular
showmen and private traders, . . . they consisted largely of an ad hoc melange of both new (me-
chanical rides) and traditional popular entertainments (freak shows etc).”7 As expositions came in-
creasingly under the control of the central government, the fairgrounds more closely complemented
the themes presented in the official zones.

Such a relationship is evident in the displays devoted to Algeria, prominent among the pavilions
of the Trocadéro Gardens (on the Right Bank of the Seine across the river from the Ei¤el Tower)
that housed the French colonies, foreign colonies, sovereign Oriental powers, and attractions like the
the Trans-Siberian Panorama.8 Algeria, as the richest French colony, had pride of place on the main
axis between the Trocadéro and the Ei¤el Tower. Its official and commercial sections were housed
in two separate buildings on either side of the great thoroughfare. (The commercial section is visi-
ble in Figure 46.) Both were designed in the “Moorish” style by the French architect Albert Ballu.9
The Palace of Algerian Attractions, a conglomerate of “picturesque, familial, and mercantile Alge-

106 Colonial Panoramania

figure 45
Colonial precinct of the
Trocadéro Palace gardens,
west side, Paris Exposition,
1900.

ria,”10 was a major site of colonial panoramania: it housed two commercial installations, the Moving
Stereorama, and the Algerian Diorama (to which I will turn shortly). Below them was the much pho-
tographed Algerian Quarter, a corner of a generic casbah reconstructed on the banks of the Seine.
The idea was derived from the famous Cairo Street of the 1889 exposition, with a similar emphasis
on the realism of the facsimile architecture.

Colonial Panoramania 107

figure 46 The Algerian Street—Unofficial Section, Paris Exposition, 1900.

Indeed simulacra played a crucial role in the exhibitionary complex. The streets and villages of
1900, with their sta¤ of transported indigenes, claimed to remove observers to the other world. They
were a confluence of dreams and real-life encounters: indigenous displays were often the site of lu-
dic exchanges, ennui, even sexual engagements that shattered the illusion of a pristine world of vi-
sual alterity. As early as the 1867 exposition commentators sensed the now familiar idea of the ex-
position as microcosm: “This immense exposition recapitulates the entire world. . . . Dreamers of
travel, those who are attached by the short chain of their jobs and who dream of excursions to the
banks of the Nile or the Bosphorus . . . have no reason to complain. If they cannot go to the Orient,
the Orient has come to them.”11

Opposite the jumbled Palace of Algerian Attractions was the spatially more coherent Official Palace
of Algeria, a government installation in composite Moorish style, with horseshoe arches and a long
colonnade. The central court, with its ceremonial staircase addressing the Pont d’Iéna, was based on
one in the Bardo Palace, and the dome and minaret, on Algerian models like the Mosque of Bou Me-

108 Colonial Panoramania

dine near Tlemcen. On the Official Palace ’s basement floor a set of casts of classical antiquities from
the ruins of Timgad and Tebessa established a museological tone, simultaneously claiming, that is, to
educate and delight. Those purposes were somewhat opportunistically spliced, as Zeynep Çelik points
out, with a wine bar for tasting the “delights” of colonial viticulture.12

Up on the airy first floor of the Moorish courtyard, after the displays of the Algerian press, the
education authority, and the Winter Tourism Committee of Algiers, came the stand-alone Fine Arts
Room mounted by the Orientalist Painters. It was decorated with a frieze of stenciled cactus designed
by Chudant, incorporating the initials of the Society of French Orientalist Painters.13 Here the so-
ciety had been asked to provide (as Bénédite wrote) “an exhibition of more particularly ethnographic
character.” According to the Hachette guide there was “nothing so gay and bright as this hall inun-
dated with light, where all these canvases representing scenes of Algerian life are shown to the best
advantage.” Hachette also commends a “large chart of the French domination in Africa, as well as
the relief map, 6 by 4 meters, that occupies the center of the room.”14

Such didactic displays alter the symbolic tone of the Fine Arts Room considerably. Facts and figures,
hortatory phrases, combinations of images and words were variants on the standard exposition in-
stallation that Philippe Hamon, in his book on the nineteenth-century exposition as a formation of
literature as well as architecture, has characterized as “exemplary objects.” “Scale models, blueprints
and cut-aways of machines . . . [were] all accompanied by descriptions. . . . Similarly, on the boule-
vard, items bearing names and labels were exposed behind shop windows accompanied by a lauda-
tory epideictic discourse—the advertisement.”15 Such visual and textual installations in the colonial
pavilions were designed to convince spectators of the particular colony’s economic worth and po-
tential and of the good sense of the colonial enterprise in general.

The emphasis on this “epideictic discourse” increasingly weighed against the aesthetic claims of
the fine arts at the expositions. In 1900 two permanent buildings, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais,
housed the main national fine arts displays: in the Grand Palais, contemporary works selected by the
guest nations, and in the Petit Palais the prestigious Centennial and Decennial of French Art. Art-
works not selected for display in either building were in a sense tainted by their attachment to the di-
dactic and peripheral context of the national and colonial pavilions, which were classified hierarchi-
cally, according to “nations and the supra-national constructs of empires and races.”16 Thus one
commentator, lauding the art on view in the French colonial pavilions, could lament that the official
jury of 1900 would not consider for awards any work by artists in the Trocadéro precinct.17 That is
not to say the Orientalists showing at the Algerian pavilion lacked the status as artists to be repre-
sented in the Grand Palais: works by the society stalwarts Cottet, Dinet, Leroy, and Lunois were in-
deed on exhibit there.18 But much of their work at the Grand Palais was non-Orientalist; at the Al-
gerian pavilion, in contrast, most of the one hundred and thirty-five easel paintings were of Algerian
subjects. The exceptions were works exhibited by amateur artists resident in Algeria. Their flower

Colonial Panoramania 109

pieces and portrait subjects were displayed to show that the civilized arts flourished among émigrés
to Algeria.19

Although such an exhibit assimilates art to the didactic project, the didactic genre was best visible
in the Official Palace ’s domed hall, which contained material samples of the country’s agricultural
produce: wheat, sorghum, corn, cork, and so on. The cycle of decorative paintings on its walls re-
lated to this produce: Sowing in the Arab and the French Way ( Les Sémailles à la mode arabe et à la mode
française) and The Harvest of Dates, Alfa, and Oranges ( Le Récolte des dattes, de l’alfa, des oranges).20
(Alfa is a desert grass.) Illustrative and literal, they put the technology of painterly representation
to work in a way that may today seem labor-intensive but was guaranteed to have an impact in the
age before the color photo enlargement.

These wall paintings introduce the greatly expanded context in which the technology of painting
was used at the universal expositions. Easel painting worked as a token of cultural value, the “high”
creative arts. In the environment of international competition that characterized the universal expo-
sitions, it came to stand for the prestige of French culture and the preeminence of France in the arena
of nations. The role of specifically colonial easel painting was to disseminate into the representa-
tions of the colonies the capital generated by metropolitan high culture. Easel painting could be used
to claim the colonies as a vehicle for the arts and, when those colonies themselves begot such paint-
ing, as proof of the project’s instigating “culture,” as the French conceived it, in the local situation.

In some ways the true usefulness of colonial painting was realized only on the expanded scale of
decoration and beyond.21 Decorative painting had a key role in the Palace of the Ministry of
Colonies, a neobaroque building designed by Scellier de Gisors. So did large bronze sculptural groups:
in front of the building was the Monument to Madagascar ( Monument de Madagascar) by Louis Ernest
Barrias, dedicated to “the memory of the officers, soldiers, and sailors who died for our country, Mada-
gascar 1895.”22 Inside, the distinguished official painter Fernand Cormon provided two large ceiling
pieces, France and Her Colonies (La France et ses colonies) and Fauna and Flora of the Colonies (Faune
et flore des colonies). The first shows the apotheosis of a female incarnation of France, standing in the
clouds with a ring of muses behind her, welcoming a motley crew of the colonized, seen from be-
low: an Arab on a rearing horse, a Senegalese rifleman, and an Ouled-Naïl woman are all identifiable.23

It was the illusionistic technologies of the panoramas, dioramas, and their variants, however, that
transported the spectator to colonial situations with an unrivaled sensory intensity. The circular can-
vases of the panoramas proper were numerous at the 1900 exposition, especially in the colonial
precinct. The original panorama was set up in 1788 by Robert Barker in Edinburgh, and the genre
was popularized on both sides of the Channel by the great events of the Napoleonic wars. Panora-
mas, as Stephan Oetterman remarks in his fundamental study, were the most distinctively nineteenth-
century mass medium, in that the year 1900, which marked the birth of commercial cinema, also sig-
naled the demise of the panorama.24

110 Colonial Panoramania

figure 47
Joseph de la Nézière,
Diorama of Fez, Marseille,
Colonial Exposition, 1922.

Some introduction to this visual technology is in order. The principle of the panorama is to pre-
suppose an observer “who in turning round looks successively to all points of the horizon.” Such a
view is constructed in a large cylindrical room, whose inside “is covered with an accurate represen-
tation in colours of a landscape, so that an observer standing in the centre sees the picture like an ac-
tual landscape in nature completely surround him. . . . The observer stands on a platform . . . and
the space between this platform and the picture is covered with real objects [the false terrain] which
gradually blend into the picture itself. The picture is lighted from above . . . so that no light but that
reflected from the picture reaches the eye . . . the staircase [and] the platform [for the spectators] are
kept nearly dark.”25

Panoramas generally required the construction of a housing or rotunda building, and their fab-
rication posed specific problems, not least of which were the immense area of canvas to be covered,
the calculations of perspective required to make the view appear “natural” from the central platform,
and the difficulty of achieving the illusion of uniform illumination in a work produced by many hands
(Fig. 47). Constructing a false terrain to mediate the space between the foot of the viewing platform
and the edge of the circular canvas wall was another challenge. It was met by dispersing actual ob-
jects (carts or cannon, bushes, and plaster boulders) among illusionistically painted flats; cutout up-
right figures could be painted to merge visually with the picture space itself.

Colonial Panoramania 111

figure 48
Louis Tinayre, The
Panorama of Madagascar,
Paris Exposition, 1900.

At the Trocadéro two important but conventional panorama installations were run as private en-
terprises. Both were thoroughly colonial in theme, celebrating the best-known French military and
expeditionary exploits of the 1890s: the annexation of Madagascar and Colonel Marchand’s expedi-
tion across East Africa in competition with the British in the “scramble for Africa.”26 I mentioned
before that battle scenes, contemporary and commemorative, were one of the two great subjects of
the panorama (the other was the view, from a central spire or peak, of famous cities or landscapes).
Several panoramas exhibited over the century in Paris had been Oriental in theme, from the 1799
Battle of the Pyramids (reconstituted in the 1850s by Colonel Jean-Charles Langlois in homage to
Napoleon) to scenes from the Crimean War in the 1860s.

Continuing this tradition, the painter Louis Tinayre devoted the Panorama de Madagascar in 1900
to the military events by which General Joseph Gallieni achieved the surrender of the Malagasy forces
(Fig. 48). Tinayre had been present at the scene he painted. His panorama was on the upper floor of
the enormous circular Madagascar pavilion, just north of the Trocadéro Palace. The scene was in-
troduced by eight small “dioramas”—curved canvases enclosing a three-dimensional foreground on
which scale models of soldiers and armaments were set on a false terrain.27 These dioramas docu-
mented the early stages of the campaign, from the disembarkation at Majunga on. The panorama
painting itself showed “the exact position of French troops at Tananarive on 30 September 1895, with
the bombardment of the capital and the act of surrender to General Duchesne.”28 The military ac-
tion could be studied in all its detail from the central viewing platform, for which Tinayre used a spe-

112 Colonial Panoramania

figure 49
Scellier de Gisors,
Pavilion of the Dioramas,
Trocadéro Gardens, Paris
Exposition, 1900.

cially imported Malagasy timber hut. The final display of four dioramas showed the aftermath, “the
pacification and the development of the colony by General Gallieni.”29

Such a colonial panorama performed in various ways for the observer. It served as an object of what
Bennett calls “stupefaction” in the face of its technological virtuosity, compounded no doubt by the
message of European technical superiority and efficacy in the art of war. At the same time it provided
an imaginary transport to Madagascar, even though panoramas, because of their very meticulousness
(as Oettermann remarks), typically leave little to the imagination. I am not arguing that the panorama
exhibits any more specific cross-cultural modality than standard Orientalist easel paintings; with equal
ease, however, it was enlisted into the political, historical, and experiential project of colonialism.

Many of the official colonial pavilions in 1900 featured smaller panoramas and dioramas; the se-
ries of Indochinese pavilions, for example, contained panoramas of the principal cities Hue, Saigon,
Phnom Penh, Mytho, and Hanoi.30 Several images of smaller Caribbean and African colonies and
protectorates that lacked their own pavilions were gathered in the Pavilion of the Dioramas (Fig.
49). Various artists associated with the Orientalist Painters were active at this pavilion. The Somali
Coast boasted an Environs de Djibouti, prepared by Henry d’Estienne for the Ministry of the
Colonies after the maquette of Marius Perret.31 Paul Bu¤et, whose demanding mission to paint in
Abyssinia with government funding is discussed in Chapter 6, presented a suite of six scenes of the
colony of Djibouti and of Abyssinia. Paul Merwaert would no doubt have been sent to French Ocea-
nia to prepare his officially sponsored diorama Pearl Fishers on the Touamotou Islands (Les Pêcheurs

Colonial Panoramania 113

de perles sur les îles Touamotou).32 In 1900 members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters acted
as experts available for hire to visualize everything in the global French overseas empire.

Displays at the Palace of Algerian Attractions (a commercial, as opposed to an official, space)
o¤ered novel physical sensations, a less earnest didacticism aligned with the pleasures of modern
tourism. In the commercial zones technical experimentation was put to work. Vying for attention
among the exhibits was “a new mechanism that has been very warmly received by the public: the
Moving Stereorama, or Poème de la Mer” (Fig. 50).33 An initiative of the entrepreneurs Francovich
and Gadan, it was described enthusiastically in the Hachette guide as “enabling us to accomplish,
without the least fatigue and sheltered from the cares of seasickness, a voyage along the Algerian
coast. With the help of an ingenious gadget—an assemblage of canvases and planes in relief that
turn before our eyes—we rapidly forget our presence on the banks of the Seine and believe ourselves
transported over the Mediterranean to within sight of the enchanting coasts of Algeria.”34 The Dutch
popular science journal De Natuur, more precise about the technology, explained that the sight-
seeing voyage began with the morning light on the fishing boats in the port of Bône (now Annaba).
Then followed a scene of Bougie (now Bejaïa), with a calm sea and blue sky, converted to choppy
sea as the viewers’ putative steamship approached Algiers (with its famous panorama of white houses
and minarets); the Poème closed within sight of the port of Oran at evening. Along the way the
spectator encountered boats of all kinds, even “an imposing squadron of warships, including iron-
clads, battle-cruisers and torpedo-boats”35—a militaristic image that announced the French posses-
sion of Algeria and advertised French sea power to all foreign visitors to the exposition. A second
geographical representation of the premier colony, a transect of the nation from the desert at Biskra
to the port of Algiers (Maxime Noiré’s painted Diorama de l’Algérie), asserted possession just as
clearly.36

Across the Seine on the Champ-de-Mars, in the continuation of the exposition behind the Ei¤el
Tower, were star commercial attractions featuring the painted canvas. Like the Moving Stereorama,
these o¤ered more than a central viewing platform and static encircling panorama. The Maréorama,
Hugo d’Alési’s installation, gave the illusion of a maritime voyage from Marseille to Constantinople
(with landings at Nice, Sousa, Naples, and Venice), as experienced from the bridge of a facsimile
steamer that rolled and pitched, because of a set of enormous hydraulic pistons. The scrolling topo-
graphical canvas required for this multisensory experience was one and a half kilometers long. Nearby
was the immensely popular Cinéorama, “a new application of the cinematograph to the panorama.”37

Most pertinent to the colonial context, however, was the Panorama du Tour du Monde, by the
architect Alexandre Marcel and the painter Louis Dumoulin (Fig. 51). Together they designed a
magnificent display on the Champ-de-Mars that today looks as if it had strayed from Euro-Disney.
Conceptually the Tour du Monde was a compressed version of Jules Verne ’s famous novel Around
the World in Eighty Days (1873) that led the visitor “from one end of the world to the other end” in

114 Colonial Panoramania

figure 50
Moving Stereorama,
Algerian section, Paris
Exposition, 1900.
figure 51
Louis Dumoulin and
Alexandre Marcel, Le
Tour du Monde, Paris
Exposition, 1900.

115

just over an hour.38 The exterior of Marcel and Dumoulin’s multistory building was a polyglot of
architectures: a Cambodian temple, or wat; a seven-story Chinese pagoda; an entrance based on a
Japanese ceremonial gateway; and an apparently North Indian balconied main structure. It was
vaunted as one of the most original creations of the exposition: “No expense has been spared in mak-
ing this spectacle as exact and as seductive as possible. The gate alone, executed by Japanese car-
penters using materials from Japan, cost one hundred thousand francs.”39 Visitors descended the in-
terior in a slow spiral, walking past large-scale dioramas with topographical backdrops painted by
Dumoulin and his team. In these dioramas “M. Dumoulin had ingeniously organized in the fore-
ground little scenes containing indigenous persons from the countries represented: this was the ani-
mated panorama.”40

It is not surprising that Dumoulin ventured an innovation in panorama scenography. Early in his
career he had executed the vast panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, one of the few panoramas still
on view today.41 In 1900 Dumoulin’s scenes combined the familiar ideas of the indigenous village
and the theatrical performance—what Sylviane Leprun calls “plastic ethnology”—with large-scale
topographical painting.42 As surviving photographs indicate, however, claims to scientific accuracy
should not be exaggerated: in the Tour du Monde Dumoulin played fast and loose with ethnic and
national identity, particularly that of peoples colonized by European powers. In one photograph (per-
haps a montage) Javanese dancers and a gamelan orchestra from the Dutch East Indies perform be-
fore a painted view of Angkor Wat, emerging from its jungle fastness in French Cambodia (Fig. 52).
Thousands of kilometers are compressed into this collage of exotic icons.

Dumoulin was more respectful in his diorama of Japan, a sovereign nation that, after all, had its
own pavilion at the exposition. Twelve professional geishas brought over from Tokyo figure in a for-
mal garden at cherry-blossom time at Nikko, “the holy mountain, covered with thousand-year-old
temples and admirable gardens.”43 From such Far Eastern dioramas as this and the Chinese Village
at Shanghai, Dumoulin moved westward, to a scene of Port Said on the Suez Canal and a Cemetery
in Constantinople. This last ensemble was transparently inspired by Pierre Loti’s most famous novel,
Aziyadé (1879).44

A commercial attraction like the Tour du Monde stood outside the normal taxonomy of exhibit-
ing nation-states that Tony Bennett elucidates. It included scenes from subject states, colonies both
French and otherwise, and nations that were sovereign (albeit under pressure from European pow-
ers), like China, Japan, and Turkey. The physical situation of the Tour du Monde gives the clue to
its interpretation: located well away from the official colonial precinct, near the northeast pier of the
Ei¤el Tower, it was adjacent to the pavilions of the Alpine and Automobile Clubs—travel and sport-
ing bodies with strong links to the tourist industry. More significant, its position in the overall lay-
out matched that of the Maréorama, the Cinéorama, and a ride named the Great Celestial Globe: like
them, it was an attraction of the new technologies of vision. Trading on the empirical, mimetic, and

116 Colonial Panoramania

figure 52
Louis Dumoulin’s
painted view of Angkor
Wat with Javanese dancers,
Le Tour du Monde, Paris
Exposition, 1900.

ethnographic languages of the official colonial pavilions, but not limited by the actualities of colo-
nial control, the Tour du Monde took the entire world of mankind, in one imperializing sweep, as its
field of representation.

In constructing it, Louis Dumoulin had unequaled authority. As a longtime official painter to the
French navy, he indeed became a kind of Pierre Loti of the painted view. (Loti’s source material for
his exotic romances was his lifelong career as a naval officer.) As for Dumoulin, travels around the
world a¤orded this former student of Henri Gervex who had once sought and received the advice
of Edouard Manet an unending series of landscapes and scènes de moeurs (human studies).45 Dumoulin
worked in a bright-toned, quasi-impressionist technique, displaying an eye for vivid detail and a some-
times daring sense of composition. His curiosity about the Far East piqued during the 1880s by the
japonisme craze, Dumoulin obtained from Director of Fine Arts Castagnary a diplomatic passport
and free passage with the French navy on sea-lanes heading east. In 1889 he exhibited one hundred
paintings he had made in Japan, China, and Indochina. (The great supporter of japonisme Philippe
Burty wrote the preface to the catalogue.) The exhibition successfully presented some of the early
painted images of sites of a kind made popular by novels like Loti’s Mme Chrysanthème (which in-
spired Van Gogh’s Japanophilia).46

Prior to 1900 Dumoulin was no stranger to the great expositions: the Indochinese part of his Far
Eastern suite had been put on view in the International and Colonial Exposition of Lyon in 1894.47

Colonial Panoramania 117

The idea for the Tour du Monde possibly arose at that time, with Dumoulin surrounded by small-
scale colonial pavilions. In any event, it became one of the most popular attractions at the 1900 Paris
Universal Exposition. Curiously, Léonce Bénédite did not co-opt the talents of Dumoulin, who never
exhibited at the Orientalist Painters. On the contrary, Dumoulin, who after his success in 1900 was
appointed commissioner of fine arts for the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille, went on
to found the only exhibiting society that rivaled the Orientalist Painters, the Colonial Society of French
Artists.

Modalities of the Salonnet

The second strategy for disseminating Orientalist art into the broad public domain of the expositions
grew out of the society’s primeval function: that of mounting exhibitions of easel painting. Hardly a
radical cultural practice, it did less to cross the hierarchies of the visual than the Orientalist Painters’
participation in panorama painting and its mechanized variants. Yet in manipulating what I call the sa-
lonnet, the proponents of Orientalist art siphoned o¤ the high art of painting from respectable exhi-
bitions and moved it into the carnavalesque world of temporary colonial representations.

Thus in 1900 the Orientalist Painters engaged in a third, most unexpected, participation, in a largely
forgotten zone of spectacle: Andalusia in the Time of the Moors. This “immense village” covered
five thousand square meters of the Trocadéro Gardens,48 presenting “all that is picturesque from an-
cient and modern Spain. It is the ‘Rue du Caire ’ of 1900, better run.”49 Its organizer is described as
a M. Roseyro, apparently a publisher with links to L’Illustration and the Revue des deux mondes. It has
been suggested that Roseyro was of Sephardic Jewish background, which might explain the drive to
re-create a time when Jewish as well as Islamic high culture flourished on the Iberian Peninsula.50

The writer Armand Silvestre, who himself had established a popular theater at the 1900 exposi-
tion, set the scene in his guidebook: “With this magnificent reconstitution, one can relive the Arab
civilization of the fifteenth century, which shone with such brightness in the South of Spain. For this
the promoters of the enterprise have had only to draw upon the marvelous treasures of Moorish ar-
chitecture that the monuments of Cordoba, Seville, and Granada have preserved for us.”51 The two
major architectural works were the Lion Court, based on the Patio of the Lions at the Alhambra Palace
in Granada (Fig. 53), and the tower of the Giralda at Seville, seventy meters high, like the original,
and topped with its gyrating golden Genius. The Giralda encapsulates the theme of cultural hybridity
and accretion that animates Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, being “Moorish in its base, Re-
naissance in its bell tower.”52 The Alhambra, as an architectural marvel, had been a place of pilgrimage
for Orientalist artists and writers since the early nineteenth century.53 The challenge for the organ-
izers of Andalusia in 1900 was to reconstitute the historical environment of the Alhambra. This they
did (at least in the official exposition photograph) with a montage of Maghrebian men and women

118 Colonial Panoramania

figure 53
Lion Court, Andalusia
in the Time of the Moors,
Paris Exposition, 1900.

inserted into the colonnades of the Lion Court, with not a European visitor to be seen—visually re-
installing the exiled Moors of historical memory.

The question of ethnic identity in the Andalusia display was cut through with a historical aware-
ness not apparent in the Tour du Monde. The Livre d’or of the exposition deprecated the culture of
Catholic Spain: “The domination of the Moors is incontestably the most brilliant epoch in the his-
tory of Spain. These alleged barbarians in e¤ect brought with them—together with perfect man-
ners and a high degree of civilization—the arts and sciences that the Germanic invasions have erased
from memory.”54 This theme of cultural admiration and historical regret casts an interesting light
on contemporary attitudes toward the talents of the Muslims, whose descendants in the Maghreb were
now colonial subjects of the French. At the Andalusia display a small hippodrome in the shadow of
the Giralda gave a spectacular physical expression to historical conflicts between the Moors and Chris-
tians (Fig. 54). Recalling the mortal entertainments of the Roman circus, its track of sixty meters was
intended for “fantasias, for tournaments between Moors and Christian knights, for gazelle hunts with
sloughis (Arab greyhounds), for the attack on a caravan by Touareg, for the ceremonies of a Gypsy
marriage.”55

Colonial Panoramania 119

figure 54
The Arena, Andalusia
in the Time of the Moors,
Paris Exposition, 1900.

Christian knights jousting with Moors would activate memories of the Crusades, and of Emperor
Charlemagne, who had halted the Saracen armies at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in 778. That was
the central action of the medieval French literary classic the Chanson de Roland. Yet in 1900 from the
French perspective, the camel-mounted Touareg (the Berber nomads always clad in blue who dom-
inated the Sahara) were a real threat to Saharan trade routes and to France ’s attempts to extend its
military rule into the far south of Algeria, where the French were also pressuring the sultan of Mo-
rocco for territorial concessions. The Touareg had almost nothing to do with medieval Andalusia,
but everything to do with the French experience of resistant Islam.

Such feigned martial conflicts may have had less allure than the varieties of dance performed at
ethnically coded sites across the Andalusian precinct. Dance has been identified as one of the great

120 Colonial Panoramania

figure 55
Room of the Society of
French Orientalist Painters,
Ghent Exposition, 1913.

signifiers of cultural identity as well as sexuality in the romance of the universal expositions.56 Given
the absence of living Moorish culture in present-day Andalusia, Maghrebian dancers were called to
duty. Thus dancers of the sect of Aïssaouas performed adjacent to a copy of the facade of the Mosque
of the Aïssaouas from Tétouan in Morocco. Elsewhere, Jewish women from Tangier, Kabyles, and
Ouled-Naïl women were figures of the past, standing in for exiles from Andalusia, relics of a cul-
ture lost to Europe. But they were also figures of contemporary currency, exponents of an allure fa-
miliar to colonial tourists and soldiers in present-day Algeria. In contrast, the dance troupes brought
up from Spain—the “Sévillanaises” with their bolero or the Gypsy flamenco dancers from present-
day Granada—presented a less conflicted view of the balletic arts and could still in some sense be
claimed as European.

Against this background of bodies and beasts in conflict, and of passionate dance, the logic of the
Orientalist Painters’ presence is that of quietude and the museum. “Museum” is indeed the name
given to the space where “the Society of Orientalist Painters . . . has organized an exhibition of the
finest works by its members. Next to these canvases so full of sun and light we find a complete ret-
rospective exhibition of Muslim art.”57 No doubt the Orientalists o¤ered characteristic scenes of
Maghrebian life in which no European presence was felt, symbolizing the life of old Moorish An-
dalusia. A later photograph shows a typical society installation, with paintings of the Maghreb, Ori-
ental carpets, clay sculpture on pedestals, a leatherwork saddle, and even arrays of Moorish weapons
(Fig. 55). There would certainly have been Spanish scenes—previous Orientalists’ Salons had reg-
ularly included works painted in Spain, a country that (as the colonial novelists the Leblond broth-
ers expressed it) was the very “liege land of Orientalism.”58

Colonial Panoramania 121

This salonnet functioned, then, not like a panorama, which presented a view of a singular loca-
tion, but like a multifarious collective view of lands settled, either currently or in the past, by the
Moors. As a scattered collectivity it nuanced a straightforward trompe l’oeil landscape painted on a
high brick wall opposite the Spanish Village: a giant view of the Alhambra and Monte Sacro. The
museum even contained a metonym for Spain itself: an exhibition dedicated to the bullfight. One imag-
ines its appeal to the young Andalusian Pablo Picasso, had he strayed over to Andalusia in the Time
of the Moors during his visit to the Paris exposition. At the Grand Palais, his bedside melodrama
Dying Moments (Derniers moments) was an official Spanish entry, even if his bread-and-butter paint-
ings in 1900 were scenes of the bullfight and the café-concert.

The main surviving record of the Orientalist Painters’ contribution is the poster Andalusia in the
Time of the Moors (L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures), by Etienne Dinet (see Plate 7). Featuring a
life-size figure of a female dancer, this enormous chromolithograph, framed by panels of hand-painted
tiles, is full of verve despite its somewhat garish colors. In it Dinet imagines an Andalusia straight
from his studies of the Ouled-Naïl in Bou-Saâda and Laghouat: a tattooed young Berber woman in
rich flowing robes of green and yellow and heavy silver amulets dances in a narrow horseshoe arch-
way. Behind her, smiling Arab men smoke and wait in the purplish evening air. This poster too has
its epideictic function: the dancer exhorts passersby to enter her gourbi, or Moorish village—which
after all allegorizes the Andalusian exhibit itself. Dinet’s Andalusia stresses the Islamic element at
the expense of the Spanish, rereading the historical other in a contradictory colonial present.

The multiple involvements of the Society of French Orientalist Painters at the 1900 Paris expo-
sition opened the path for further exploits. The society had impressed the commissioner of the colo-
nial section, Jules Charles-Roux, a wealthy industrialist, writer, and politician from Marseille (Fig.
56).59 When in 1906 he was head of Marseille ’s own great exposition, he gave extraordinary promi-
nence to the visual arts. Marseille ’s mounting of the first-ever national colonial exposition needs ex-
plaining. As the great colonial port of France, Marseille served North Africa and all the Eastern ship-
ping routes. A large and wealthy city, it was a commercial rival of Paris. In an era when great
exhibitions were a mark of the ambition and prestige of emerging capitals—Philadelphia, Melbourne,
Chicago, Lyon, Hanoi, Liège—Marseille was eager to seize such an opportunity for itself. At the
close of the 1900 exposition the interest in the colonial domain was such that a further exposition was
planned, in which the colonies would be the exclusive subject of study. The exposition, backed by
the powerful Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, opened there in April 1906 on a campus of thirty-
six hectares at Longchamp. Before closing in November, its total of 7,960 exhibitors drew some 1.8
million visitors.60 The exposition had two principal parts: a Grand Palais, showing the metropole ’s
o¤erings to the colonies, and a series of colonial pavilions containing products destined for conti-
nental Europe. The two other key sections were oceanography and the fine arts.

One result of the Marseille exposition was a lesson in decentralization. Germany, Britain, Bel-

122 Colonial Panoramania

figure 56
Jules Charles-Roux, 1906.

gium, Russia, Spain, and even Mexico sent official visitors delegated to study French colonialism.
Charles-Roux’s opening speeches favorably documented the weight of Marseille and the colonial sec-
tor in the overall French economy.61 The success of the 1906 and 1922 Marseille expositions was rec-
ognized in 1983, when the city commemorated the two events with a series of retrospectives. Mayor
Gaston Deferre (the husband of the writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was the granddaughter of
Jules Charles-Roux and the biographer of Isabelle Eberhardt) evoked the refusal of the people of
Marseille “to bow to the excesses of an aggressive centralism, imposing their initiatives, defending
them when Paris sought to thwart them.”62

For Commissioner Charles-Roux, the abundance of fine arts exhibitions was deliberate policy. In
his preface to the luxurious illustrated catalogue Charles-Roux laments the indi¤erence of the French
public to “the lessons of the official displays—statistics, graphics, the rather arid documentation.” He
perceived that more spectacular attractions, including the ever-popular exhibitions of painting, might
redress the problem.63 At Marseille the fine arts were installed as an “attraction” in the pavilion of

Colonial Panoramania 123

the Ministry of the Colonies. Over half of its eleven rooms were given to painting and sculpture,
but to reach them the visitor had to run the gauntlet of rooms devoted to the Geographical Service,
colonial health, and so on.64

The nature of the fine arts displays was determined by Louis Dumoulin, by then the artistic ad-
visor and commissioner of fine arts at Marseille. Dumoulin had collaborated closely with Charles-
Roux in 1900 in designing the Grotte Khmer for the Indochinese section (as well as mounting the
Tour du Monde), and Charles-Roux had formed a high opinion of his “talent as an artist and as met-
teur en scène.” By appointing Dumoulin, Charles-Roux wished to avoid the “chaos and the errors of
taste that often exist in these colossal agglomerations of monuments, of palaces and kiosks, of tow-
ers and campaniles, of grottos . . . bridges, and walkways.” Dumoulin’s role was to coordinate and
harmonize the “plantation du décor” for the whole exposition, as well as oversee the fine arts.65

In keeping with the vigorous regionalism of the Marseille e¤ort, a major retrospective of Provençal
art was installed in the metropolitan pavilion, the Grand Palais. It included works from the Avignon
Primitives to artist heroes like Pierre Puget and Jean-Honoré Fragonard to the nineteenth-century
Provençaux François Granet and Adolphe Monticelli.66 Contemporary Provençal art was repre-
sented in surprisingly advanced form by Matisse ’s friend from Marseille, Charles Camoin, and the
young expressionist Auguste Chabaud. Paul Cézanne, however, the most patriotic of all Provençal
avant-gardists, was not included. Even in 1906 (the last year of his life) Cézanne was very likely
too controversial. Yet his spirit hovers over the strange exotic scene at Longchamp, where pagodas
and the tower of Angkor Wat were profiled against what Charles-Roux called the “marvelous decor
of mountains”—the rocky mountains of L’Estaque where Cézanne had recently made some of his
greatest landscapes.

The contemporary vigor of the Orientalist movement was well established in the pavilion of the
Ministry of the Colonies. The largest room was given to the “living Orientalist and colonial artists,”
including members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters.67 Dumoulin, however, enlisted an-
other group of colonial painters, by and large artists working for the various ministries or colonial
governments. Several of them were familiar from Paris in 1900: Georges Rochegrosse from Algiers,
Charles Duvent and Joseph de la Nézière with their Far Eastern views, Paul Merwaert (who had died
in 1902) with his West African sites, and José Silbert, the president of the Marseille painters’ group.
Silbert exhibited figure paintings studied from life in Tangier and Algiers, like his Cockatoo Trainer
(Montreur de cacatoès), its technique realist but its colors almost psychedelic, like the rainbow-hued
cockatoos themselves.68 Silbert would play a major role in organizing the fine arts at the next National
Colonial Exposition of Marseille, in 1922.

An additional salonnet that sprang from Dumoulin’s initiative comprised the works of young French
painters competing for new traveling scholarships instituted for the Marseille colonial exposition. Af-
ter that competition Dumoulin and Gaston Bernheim (of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery) went on to

124 Colonial Panoramania

form the Colonial Society of French Artists (Coloniale for short), modeled on Bénédite ’s Oriental-
ist Painters, to encourage such grants.69

Charles-Roux saw the value of mounting a historical exhibition of the colonial visual arts “to es-
tablish the balance sheet of our colonial riches, our wealth of memories.” The display had two sec-
tions, a historical colonial exhibition and a retrospective of Orientalism. The first sought to evoke “the
glorious epochs when France was the sovereign mistress of India, Louisiana, and Canada,” as well as
to follow the more familiar campaigns of expansion in Indochina, Madagascar, and West Africa. Paint-
ings, engravings, lithographs, and curios would “reawaken the dormant specters of men and the fail-
ing memories of things.”70 This exhibition of colonial history was small, but as Charles-Roux pre-
dicted, it became a standard feature of subsequent colonial expositions—that of Vincennes in 1931,
for example, with its theme of celebrating the centenary of Algeria as a French possession, was a ma-
jor undertaking, researched over several years and provided with a significant scholarly catalogue.

The Retrospective Exhibition of French Orientalists consolidates a familiar idea, first broached in
the early 1890s by Bénédite. To curate this Marseille retrospective, however, Charles-Roux called
on the talents of Gaston Bernheim. His enlistment in the colonial cause at first seems surprising:
with his brother, Josse, Bernheim was the director of one of the most distinguished art dealerships
in Paris, bidding fair to supplant Durand-Ruel’s hold on the market for nineteenth-century pro-
gressive artists, established contemporaries like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, and, after
1909, new talents like Matisse. As is so often the case, Gaston Bernheim had a colonial background,
having spent his youth in the French Antilles. He was also an amateur painter, who exhibited fe-
male nudes from time to time under the name Gaston de Villers. His experience at Marseille had a
lasting impact on the colonial art scene in that he became one of its major promoters in the 1920s,
as treasurer of the Coloniale.

Bernheim’s retrospective of sixty canvases drew largely from private collections, including the
families of artists like Belly, Guillaumet, and Chassériau, and from major collectors like Prince Alexan-
dre de Wagram and the specialist collector of Orientalism from Angers, a M. Bessonneau (who lent
ten major pieces). Bernheim’s retrospective was peculiar in unexpectedly including the modernists
Edouard Manet and Paul Gauguin with the Orientalists recognized as canonical. Manet was repre-
sented by a portrait bust entitled Negro Woman (Négresse), whose inclusion seems primarily a way of
annexing the great modernist, somewhat unconvincingly, to the exoticist tradition.71 To claim Renoir
and Gauguin seems more legitimate. The Algerian phase of Renoir (with Besnard, the only living
artist in this retrospective) had already been accredited by the Society of French Orientalist Painters.
At Marseille Renoir was represented by three canvases: the Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah (lent by
Claude Monet), Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, and an unidentified Head of an Algerian Woman
(Tête d’Algérienne).72

Paul Gauguin had heretofore been rigorously excluded from all exhibitions of Orientalist art, de-

Colonial Panoramania 125

spite critical acclaim and the abundance of his Tahitian paintings on the Parisian art market after 1893
(he died in 1903). Bénédite would have none of him, either at the Orientalist Painters or in collect-
ing for the Luxembourg. Roger Marx, however, had included Gauguin in the Centennial of French
Art at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, and at Marseille his Tahitian Landscape (Paysage à Tahiti)
was legitimized in the catalogue with the phrase “Centennale 1900.” Gauguin’s Martinique (La Mar-
tinique) was lent by Prince de Wagram, probably a major Bernheim client.73 Some months before the
massive Gauguin retrospective at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the injection of the still con-
troversial Gauguin into this construct of a colonial canon was certainly daring. Bernheim apparently
sought to raise the prestige of Orientalist art by affiliating the work of the avant-gardist with it. Yet
it is a historically accurate connection that few twentieth-century scholars saw fit to make.

The final Orientalist salonnet to be considered here, as bizarrely unexpected as that at Andalusia
in the Time of the Moors, occurred in 1907 at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Nogent-sur-Marne. Af-
ter 1900 this botanical garden was well known for its small colonial expositions focusing on agricul-
ture and accompanying tribal encampments. The origins of the colonial garden at Nogent went back
to 1897, when a Tunisian bureaucrat proposed a botanical garden for Paris where new plants could
be grown under agronomical conditions and experiments made to save new colonists time and un-
certainty. In 1898 an officer was sent to study Kew Gardens outside London, and a tract of state land
near Vincennes, at Nogent-sur-Marne, was ceded to the Ministry of the Colonies for the creation of
a “Jardin d’Essai colonial.”74

Expositions began to be organized at Nogent under ministerial patronage. As early as 1905 one of
the nine categories (tropical agriculture, husbandry of exotic animals, colonial engineering, and so
forth) of the National Exposition of Colonial Agriculture included the surprising class of fine arts.75
Once again painting and the graphic arts appeared, to document the colonial e¤ort visually. At the
same time the contexts in which such art appeared tell us something about the mechanics of “coloni-
sation intellectuelle” and the colonial process itself. When the National Colonial Exposition was or-
ganized at Nogent for the summer of 1907, the Society of French Orientalist Painters, no doubt
spurred by the success of its Marseille venture, was called in. It seemed almost too easy to arrange,
“in the middle of the reconstituted or lived scenes of colonial life, . . . the pavilion of fine arts or-
ganized by the Society of French Orientalists . . . [containing] souvenirs of local customs, of dis-
tant voyages, and of picturesque interiors.”76

Here was more proof that a colonial exposition, however unlikely in theme, could hardly be con-
ceived without two-dimensional representations. Once again the high art of painting was expected
to inhabit a world of the exotic recognized as a theater of representations. A particular e¤ort was
made to maximize the presence of indigenous peoples at the Colonial Garden at Nogent. The French
colonies were represented there by now familiar installations, for example, the Annamite Fort, and
the Kanaka and Congolese Villages. Pride of place was reserved for the display entitled Touareg of
the Sahara, an attraction organized by the popular magazine Journal de Voyages.77

126 Colonial Panoramania

The relevance of such displays to the advanced visual arts in the summer of 1907—the high sum-
mer of the Parisian avant-garde ’s Africanism, that of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse ’s
Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (Nu bleu [Souvenir de Biskra])—is something that has yet to be in-
vestigated. The presence of such displays is certainly suggestive, strengthening the argument that
opportunities for an avant-garde awareness of African and Oceanic peoples and arts amounted to
more than masks that could be bought at bric-a-brac shops or visits to the Trocadéro Museum.78 Proof
that progressive commentators knew of the ethnographic presence at the Colonial Garden comes at
least as early as 1912, in an article by the prominent young critic Léon Werth, published in the Grande
Revue (where Matisse ’s “Notes of a Painter” had been published four years before). In it Werth man-
ifests his sympathy for the persons and culture of displaced Africans, e¤ectively themselves an ex-
hibit at the Colonial Garden.79 When French colonial troops from North and West Africa fought in
France during World War I, such sympathy flowered, contributing in the 1920s to the taste for l’art
nègre and American jazz music.

In closing the chapters on the Society of French Orientalist Painters, I have moved the debate from
the specialist written discourse of Orientalist aesthetics to the broadest sphere of interaction with the
public. There is some value in seeing the Orientalist painting movement as the visual “research and
development” wing of the whole colonial movement. The universal expositions, with their commer-
cial and quasi-industrial aspects—the gigantism of the displays, their technocratic bias, the vast num-
bers and diversity of the spectators—provided an ideal forum for the various interests involved.

Those interests were as varied as a powerful Chamber of Commerce wishing to promote colonial
trade (led by Charles-Roux at Marseille in 1906); a possibly Sephardic Jewish entrepreneur wishing
to glorify a pre-Catholic, tolerant Islamic world (Roseyro’s Andalusia in the Time of the Moors); an
entrepreneurial artist capitalizing on long years of overseas travel and research by harnessing the
taste for exoticism (Dumoulin’s Tour du Monde); and a colonial government working in tandem with
the Ministry of the Colonies to expose and popularize its achievements in the cultural and touristic
precincts of the Algerian pavilions of 1900. At that historical moment, the Society of French Ori-
entalist Painters (and its cohorts like Dumoulin and his Coloniale) provided a highly flexible mech-
anism of image making. It infiltrated the field of public vision, much like the cinema and color pho-
tography at expositions later in the century, but with a whi¤ of the ine¤able that “art” provides.

Colonial Panoramania 127