One of the few pictures to play up to the stereotype is William Allan’s The Slave Market, Constantinople of 1838, an accomplished piece of melodrama where a Christian family is being broken up by pitiless Ottoman slave dealers gathered in the lee of the great city’s minarets. The men are dragged off to join the Sultan’s army while the supplicant women are destined for the harem. Allan intended his frisson-inducing picture as a denunciation of the slave trade and nine years later Istanbul slave market was closed for good.
Rather less straightforward are Dadd and Holman Hunt’s pictures. Dadd, who was committed to Bedlam hospital for the insane after murdering his father, had previously visited the Holy Land. Paintings such as The Halt in the Desert, c1845, and The Flight Out of Egypt, 1849-50, revisit his travels with a strange, supernatural intensity, his teeming Old Testament figures inhabiting a world of cartoonish colour and linearity. Holman Hunt used real Biblical settings as the background for his own heightened religiosity, swamping them with colour and allegorical content. Even landscapes such as his view of Nazareth of 1860-1 make uncomfortable viewing.
What this thoughtful and overdue exhibition reveals is not just the strength of responses the Near East provoked in British artists, but the variety and seriousness with which they treated it. It is proof too that Orientalist paintings can be appreciated without the imposition of a pejorative cultural apparatus. Enough Said, as it were.
