Classicism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-century British Painting

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At once situated at the crossover between continents and claimed as constitutive of Europeancultural identity, Greece and the 'classical lands' skirting the Mediterranean have longoccupied a contentious position in the construction of a binary between 'East' and 'West'. Ihope to explore this liminal status by examining an artistic category where the two discoursesintersect: representations of 'Oriental' and 'classical' worlds in nineteenth-century Britishpainting. Under the broad heading of 'academic' art, both the East and Greco-Roman pastbecome overlapping spaces for projecting fantasy and creating timeless scenes of artful'realism'. Though informed by travel and scholarship, archaeology and texts, both subjectsare often constructed from parallel stereotypes of luxury and indolence, violence anderoticism, tyranny and un-Christian mystery. While a few art historians (notably RosemaryBarrow) have recognised similarities between classical and Orientalist genre and landscapepainting, I intend to go further by examining the implications of artists travelling to 'classicallands' which overlapped with the 'East' - the classical discovered in an Oriental world aswell as the classical imagined as an Oriental world.By acknowledging that many artists engaged with both discourses, I want to draw a line fromBritish classical travellers from the beginning of the century (in inevitable dialogue withFrench counterparts) to later 'Orientalists' Edwin Long, David Roberts and J.F. Lewis and'classical' painters like Alma-Tadema, Leighton and Waterhouse. Though the two discoursescan be traced to antiquity, it was waning Ottoman power across the nineteenth century thatwarranted western-European governments, scholars and artists to take greater interest ineastern Mediterranean 'classical lands'. To many, contemporary Greece came across asparadoxically and sometimes distressingly 'Oriental', not to mention the vestiges of classicalarchaeology further east. In the past two decades academics like Stathis Gourgouris, PhirozeVasunia and Yannis Hamilakis have emphasised historical and theoretical intersections ofclassical scholarship and imperialism or (Phil)Hellenism and Orientalism. What this valuablebody of scholarship lacks, however, is a thorough engagement with visual sources broadlyand painting specifically: a body of evidence conventionally left to art historians.For my PhD I hope to continue the interdisciplinary path I pursued at MPhil, where Icombined reception studies with art-historical scholarship to research British artists travellingin Greece and Carthaginian Dido in nineteenth-century painting. Since then I have continuedresearching nineteenth-century art (especially Orientalist painting) for Sotheby's Victorianand Pre-Raphaelite Department. Though I have often come across criticism of classical andOriental subjects as artificial and clichéd for staying within their formal and generic limits, itis these shared limits that interest me. By considering the two as part of a single visualculture, the simultaneous sense of 'distance' and 'proximity' characterising British artists'relationship with antiquity can be compared with what Edward Said called the 'intimateestrangement' of the East. Taking inspiration from debates around power and culturegenerated by Orientalist art, I wish to ask what the significance is for representations of aclassical world all too often presented as a symbol of Western supremacy.