Fine Antique 1930s ORIENTALIST Arab Nomad Camel Desert Landscape Oil Painting

This is a wonderful and Fine Antique 1930s ORIENTALIST Arab Nomad Camel Desert Landscape Oil Painting on Canvas, depicting several Arabian nomads astride camels, with white sand dunes and camel hoofprints in the foreground, and a boundless desert vista expanding outward. In the far distance, countless cerulean and goldenrod hued dunes can be seen. This piece appears to be unsigned, but perhaps you recognize the artist or their work? Approximately 21 1/2 x 39 3/4 including frame.

Actual artwork is approximately 17 3/4 x 36 1/4 inches. Good - Fair overall condition for decades of age and storage, with mild - moderate scuffs, scratches and speckles of paint loss throughout the surface of the painting please see all photos carefully. Acquired in Los Angeles County, California. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! The Orient-including present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa-exerted its allure on the Western artist's imagination centuries prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. Figures in Middle Eastern dress appear in Renaissance and Baroque works by such artists as Bellini, Veronese, and Rembrandt, and the opulent eroticism of harem scenes appealed to the French Rococo aesthetic. Until this point, however, Europeans had minimal contact with the East, usually through trade and intermittent military campaigns. In 1798, a French army led by General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and occupied the country until 1801. The European presence in Egypt attracted Western travelers to the Near and Middle East, many of whom captured their impressions in paint or print. In 1809, the French government published the first installment of the twenty-four-volume. (1809-22), illustrating the topography, architecture, monuments, natural life, and population of Egypt. Was the most influential of many works that aimed to document the culture of this region, and it had a profound effect on French architecture and decorative arts of the period, as evidenced in the dominance of Egyptian motifs in the Empire style. Some of the first nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings were intended as propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule.

Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa. (1804; Musée du Louvre, Paris), featuring an Eastern architectural setting and figures in exotic dress.

A propagandizing work, it depicts the general's visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa. Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. (1827-28; both Louvre) embody in images of war and destruction the Romantic themes of human pathos, uncontrollable force, and emotional extremes. The emphasis on military brutality in many Oriental subjects by Western artists reflects ongoing conflicts throughout the century: the Greek War of Independence (1821-30), the conquest of Algeria by the French in the 1830s, and the Crimean War (1853-56). While many Europeans relied on published travelogues and officially sanctioned literature like the.

Genre painting, the prevalent form of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by artists' direct experience of everyday life in Near Eastern cities and settlements. Gérôme popularized the theme of the bashi-bazouk, or Turkish mercenary soldier, often depicted in routine activities or at leisure, as in a canvas by Charles Bargue (1825/26-1883). For Decamps, whose late career was shaped by the year he spent in Asia Minor (1828-29), depictions of military life elevated genre subjects to the grandeur of history painting. These artists and their contemporaries also produced scenes of quiet domesticity, maternity-as in Chassériau's. Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine.

And religious piety, seen in Gérôme's. Occasionally, the Near Eastern setting provided a backdrop for religious works with Christian themes. This approach appealed particularly to British artists, as the explicitness of detail encouraged in the Orientalist style upheld the Protestant necessity for iconographic clarity and fidelity to nature in religious art.

From his sojourn in Palestine in the 1850s, William Holman Hunt produced paintings such as. The Finding of the Savior in the Temple.

(1854-55; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), which uses an Orientalist setting, and. (1854-55; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), a Christian allegory set in the Palestinian landscape. Some of the most popular Orientalist genre scenes-and the ones most influential in shaping Western aesthetics-depict harems.

Probably denied entrance to authentic seraglios, male artists relied largely on hearsay and imagination, populating opulently decorated interiors with luxuriant odalisques, or female slaves or concubines (many with Western features), reclining in the nude or in Oriental dress. Beyond their implicit eroticism, harem scenes evoked a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation to which many Westerners aspired. The taste for Orientalism further manifested itself in Eastern architectural motifs, furniture, decorative arts, and textiles, which were increasingly sought after by a European elite. Proponents of the Aesthetic movement in Great Britain (1860s-80s), who collectively advocated an aesthetic of beauty for its own sake and valued form over content in art, took particular inspiration from Oriental interiors.

The potency of Orientalist images remained undiminished for many artists into the twentieth century, including Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom took up Orientalist themes.