The Orientalists

The Orientalists by Kristian Davies published in 2005. The book is filled with great art, apparently from Davies descriptions most of it little known and much maligned by the general art "establishment" since the 20th century.

Most of the artists were Europeans who traveled to North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia in search of some escapist inspiration. They painted in a generally traditional, even academic style. The criticism is mainly that they were either cultural elitists, imperialists, racist, sexist or otherwise revisionist. They played up the mystique and lure of the Orient or portrayed the local people and cultures as backward or primitive.

The brief biographies of some of the painters and other adventurers was interesting. I've always had an interest in the grand and fantastic paintings I would occasionally see in museums but never had read, much less been taught, about them in any detail. Of course why else would I go through the trouble of finding this book in a library otherwise?

I found about 20 artists I really liked out of the bunch and made my first foray into true fine art knowledge by writing down their info and finding images of prints of their best paintings from google. In the process, I found a lot of good stuff from wikimedia commons and the internet archive. I had no idea that these sites had such a rich library of content, and in fact had better search results than the crap shoot of google image search.