Arthur Melville, An Arab Interior, 1881. Courtesy National Galleries of Scotland

Exhibition Review - The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain until August 31 2008.

Judging by some of the extraordianary portraits that welcome visitors to Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, British artists have long held a curious penchant for the Arab lands of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting is all about the paintings made by British artists between 1700 and 1920 who took up the mantle of Orientalism - the quaint and somewhat misleading name for art inspired by visits to Egypt, Syria and the remains of the Ottoman Empire.

Although the fascination evidently took root in the 17th century, it was during the 1830s, with the coming of steam trains and boats that Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey really opened up to a slew of travellers, adventurers and artists - all of them keen to absorb the mystery and exoticism of the east.

Frederick Lewis, The Bezestein Bazaar, El Khan Khalil, Cairo (The Carpet Seller), 1860 © Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery

Prominent members of the latter were William Holman Hunt, John Frederick Lewis and David Roberts – a trio who emerge from this exhibition as key artists of the Orientalist doctrine.

Lewis was perhaps the most ‘Orientalist’ of the three. Lured by the splendours of Egypt, he spent ten years embedded in Cairo in the 1840s and, like many British travellers before and since, he went native.

Fine self-portraits cast him variously as carpet seller and turbaned local, and even as a Muslim devotee at prayer in a Mosque. His immersive approach was perhaps an extreme case, but Lewis’ devotion paid off with an enthralling oeuvre of paintings. Today he is acknowledged as perhaps the finest of the Orientalist artists.

With him, in the opening galleries, are a colourful cast of characters resplendent in turbans sashes and cloaks. It's an exotic selection that shows how British artists and explorers saw the world – and how they saw themselves.

Frederic Leighton, Courtyard of a Mosque at Bursa, 1867. Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford

These romanticised depictions of Middle Eastern culture come with a raft of politics and the curation deals with these complexities through interpretive responses to the paintings penned by academics and commentators - both western and middle eastern.

Beyond this, the gallery has gone for a clear and thematic approach to this potentially complex subject, with rooms covering portraiture, landscapes, religion and gender, bringing together more than 110 watercolours and pictures from public and private collections worldwide.

Stunning images of palaces, temple ruins, mosques, cityscapes, souks, the Holy City and the harem take the visitor into sensual realms distant both in time and space.

Highlights include Gustav Bauernfeind’s Entrance to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem (1886), which was lent by Qatar Museums Authority, and Holman Hunt’s idealistic painting of an Egyptian peasant girl, The Afterglow in Egypt (1854).

(Above) John Frederick Lewis, A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842/1856. © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

There is also a comment by Hunt on the practice of veiling - The Lantern Maker's Courtship (1854-57) - which reveals the over confidence of a young British artist satirising a practice he doesn’t understand.

In the painting, a lantern maker feels a woman's face through her veil, without removing it. It gives and insight into how two worlds viewed each other then, and provokes questions about current controversies over the veil, too.

Other artists, such as David Roberts, were more sympathetic. His Church of the Nativity (1840) and his panoramic view of the ancient city of Baalbec in Lebanon (1861), lent by Sharjah Museum, show an artist grappling successfully with the majesty and mystery of the Eastern landcape.

A segue in the middle takes in broad sweeps of Anglo-Arab relations and the ebbing and flowing of the Ottoman Empire; all of it in relation to the eastern wanderings of artists and adventurers since the 1700s.

Edward Lear, Constantinople from Eyüp 1858. © Private Collection

But this gives way to an atmospheric recreation of an Eastern interior, in which hang portraits of women and family pictured in the Harem. Frank Dicksee’s Leila (1892) and Arthur Melville’s Arab Interior (1881) are just two of a series of impactful and often languorous paintings that show how the late Victorians idealised Arab culture.

A final room features some surprisingly fine and atmospheric landscapes by, among others, the nonsense poet Edward Lear before signing off with the beginnings of modernism and works by Stanley Spencer and David Bomberg. It's interesting to see how, even during the advent of Vorticism and the avant garde movement, artists couldn’t resist one last glance eastwards.

It seems that whatever the British relationship was with the region politically, the artistic fascination with the Arab lands has always been strong and mesmerising.