The Resurgence of a New Orientalism from the Middle East

Abstract

Qatar Museums possesses the most comprehensive collection of Orientalist art in the world. In the next few years, the collection will be displayed and opened to the public with a new vision. The question for Qatar Museums is how to present these works for a local and international audience in a manner that acknowledges interest in Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, but challenges the confrontational idea of West vs. East and the ethnocentric prejudice that this implies. The approach has been to expand the collection and widen the museum’s scope in order to position the collection of Orientalist art in a broader context. This includes the acquisition of modern and contemporary fashion, art and popular culture to demonstrate the continued relevance and complexity of these cultural exchanges. It also includes prioritizing subjects of enduring relevance to Qatari identity and heritage in the interpretation of the paintings, by focusing displays on topics such as horsemanship and falconry, and incorporating contemporary objects associated with these practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Orientalist Art
• Orientalism
• Post-Colonialism
• Edward Said
• Imperialism
• Qatar
• Cultural Influences
• Alexander McQueen

Qatar Museums has the largest collection of Orientalist art in the world. By Orientalism, I am referring to the movement that flourished in the nineteenth century and treated themes concerning the ‘other;’ that is, depictions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) through the eyes of Western artists. The collection includes works by artists from Europe depicting what they saw on their travels and what they invented based on existing literature and travelogues. The question facing us as curators who plan to open a museum, is how we are going to present these works for their local and international audiences in a manner that acknowledges interest in Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, but challenges the idea of West vs. East, and the ethnocentric prejudice and political bias that this implies.

The discourse of Orientalism

Interpretation is key in the discourse of Orientalism. The interpretation of the literature and the scenes from the East depicted by Western artists played a major role in shaping the attitudes, concepts and images of the Orient over time. Since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), there has been much scholarship discussing the interactions between the East and West. The seminal argument in Said’s book – that colonialism did not only take a military form, but was also a ‘discourse of domination’ (Kalmar 2012, 20; Young 2001, 383) – was a revolutionary idea that triggered endless debates. Specialists from different disciplines including art history, literature, anthropology, and musicology, have published thought-provoking books and papers in response. Albert Hourani (1991, 35) explained that scholars’ writings are formed by the culture they live in and by the ideas and conventions of their age. Most analyses of Orientalism in the years since Said’s book has come from scholars with a Western education and outlook. However, the question addressed in this paper is how do scholars and others in the East see the relationship between East and West as it manifests in Orientalism?

The resurgence of Orientalism: museum of Qatar collection

The Qatar Museums’ collection of Orientalist art was established by Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammad Al-Thani, who started to privately accumulate the works in 1992, as he mentioned in a meeting I had with him on 15 November 2021. He explained the story of the collection’s establishment and the idea of having the museum to host it. He divided the collection into three main sections: paintings, books and photographs; these were, for him, the main tools through which Europeans recorded their experience with the East between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. He was aware that cultures around the Mediterranean Basin have been interacting with each other throughout history and that these interactions had a cultural impact that endures today. Hence, from the beginning, his collection incorporated works produced by Arab scholars that showed examples of reciprocity. He took a view that these interactions should be studied and presented to people to demonstrate the importance of this cross-cultural exchange.

Today, the collection is vast and contains around 38,477 works, ranging from the sixteenth century to twentieth century. It addresses the influence of historical interactions between the cultures as a whole and acts as an illuminator on art. It contains 672 important rare books and manuscripts, among which are books of science and philosophy which Arab scholars translated from Greek philosophers and expanded on, like Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi’s Kitab suwar al-kawaki [Book of Images of the Fixed Stars], a manuscript based on Greek astronomical work, particularly the Almagest of Ptolemy, and which contains several corrections to Ptolemy’s star list. Such books are important to explore the scientific interactions between Western Asia and Europe and challenge the misguided conception that Arab science was no more than a transmitter of Western ancient science.

The collection contains over 500 oil paintings, many of which are highly significant, and 4639 watercolours by renowned Orientalists. These include Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Black Bard (Figure 1), an example of high Orientalism which has been criticized for looking down on the passive seated man. Yet the painting endorses a subsidiary role, reflecting on the museum’s remit and subtitle, ‘The Art of Cultural Exchange,’ through the depiction of objects from different cultures: the Iznik tiles were inspired by a photograph of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; the musical instrument and the sword were famous in Ethiopia and Sudan; and the slippers are Moroccan. Gustav Bauernfeind’s Market in Jaffa (Figure 2) and John Frederick Lewis’s A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai (Figure 3) manifest the admiration of these two artists for the places they visited and lived in for a long time by depicting them as inhabited by a vibrant, lively atmosphere, in order to criticize the colonialist assumption that these lands were static and lacked progress.¹ Kees Van Dongen’s Fatma (Figure 4) reveals the impact of the so-called ‘colours of the East’ on the stylistic development of art and the emergence of new artistic movements in the West. Van Dongen’s trip to North Africa profoundly affected his way of treating light and creating vigorous layers of colours in his Fauvist paintings (Chaumeil 1967, 320).

Figure 1. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Le Barde Noir The Black Bard, 1888, 61.2 × 50.8 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.706].

Figure 2. Gustav Bauernfeind, Market in Jaffa, 1890, 58 × 102 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, 2022 [OM.803].

Figure 3. John Frederick Lewis, A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1862, 39.3 × 82 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.723].

Figure 4. Kees Van Dongen, Fatma, c.1911, 65.3 × 46 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.980].

The collection, which includes around 32,473 photographs, also consists of important notable figures in the field of photography. An example is Félix Teynard, a French engineer who travelled to Egypt in 1851–1852 to produce his photographic atlas, Égypte et Nubie, sites et monuments les plus intéressants pour l'étude de l'art et de l’histoire in 1858, which he intended to complement Description de l’Egypte. Such works were seen as documents and used broadly in different fields throughout history (e.g. see below example, in cinema). Finally, the collection also comprises 191 sculptures and applied art works, including busts by Charles Cordier which are beautifully accomplished ethnographic records of identity.

In 1998, ownership of the collection was transferred to the state under the umbrella of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage, and it was exhibited for the first time in 2006 during the 15th Asian Games (ASIAD) in Doha. The collection was introduced, at the suggestion of Sh. Hassan as a member of management of Qatar Museums at that time, to limited visitors in contemporary galleries in a building owned by the Council. Objects were arranged as follows: on the first floor were masterpieces of nineteenth century landscape painting and portraiture, with a few pieces of Islamic or Oriental-influenced furniture; on the second floor were watercolours; the third floor hosted twentieth century art; and the fourth floor was reserved for various nineteenth century masterpieces composed by the leading names of the Orientalist art movement. At this stage, the building was not open to the public. Visitors, who were special guests of the National Council of Culture and scholars visiting Qatar for special occasions, were invited to view the collection and discuss their opinion on the display of these works to the public. Overall, these visitors praised the collection and its potential to present a nuanced response to the discourse around Orientalism. Based on the success of this exhibition, the idea emerged for a permanent museum housing the collection, initially to be called the Orientalist Museum.

The decision to found a museum with the objective of reflecting on this sensitive theme inspired the expansion of the collection and its introduction to the world through exhibitions, events programming and loans to international institutions, until a permanent home could be found or built. The museum’s construction is scheduled to start in 2023, with an aim to open a space within the next five years. The museum’s architectural design has been developed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, and the curatorial team is working with different institutions and related expertise to finalize the museography component of the project. The museum’s name was changed from the Orientalist Museum to Lusail Museum: The Art of Cultural Exchange to reflect the change in concept and the place where the museum is physically located. Lusail City has historical importance for being the principal residence of Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani (ca. 1827–1913), the founder of the State of Qatar, who lived during a time of active encounters between the East and Europe.

Early exhibitions

In October 2010, as one of the events celebrating Doha as the Arab Capital of Culture of the Middle East and Istanbul as the cultural capital of Europe, the museum opened an exhibition entitled A Journey into the World of the Ottomans, introducing the collection to the public for the first time (Figure 5). The artworks were selected for their insights into how their creators, Western artists, shaped the image of the Ottoman Empire and its residents for the rest of the world during this period. The themes of the exhibition included politics, customs, cosmopolitan culture, colour and clothing, reflecting the diversity of Orientalist art and the variety in representations of the ‘other.’ By focusing viewers’ attention on these specific themes, the exhibition sought to challenge the Saidian interpretation of the images represented by the works displayed in the exhibition as stereotypes, and to reshape attitudes towards the art. Said developed his theory of Orientalism in relation to a specific time associated with the European colonial expansion. Yet, the works displayed in this exhibition span from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, reflecting on the continuous influence of the artistic interactions between the East and West (Nefedova 2009).

Figure 5. Installation view of A Journey into the World of the Ottomans exhibition, 2010. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022.

A similar strategy underpinned the second exhibition, The Art of Travel: Bartholomäus Schachman 1559–1614 (Figure 6). It was first opened in Gdansk, Poland, in July 2012 and later in Doha, Qatar in November of the same year. The exhibition celebrated the important connections Qatar has with Poland. The exhibition displayed 100 watercolour miniatures from an album that was commissioned by Bartholomäus Schachman, mayor of Gdansk, during his two-year journey through the Ottoman Empire that took place in 1588 and 1589. Schachman travelled to the empire during the reign of Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1595) who actively engaged in international politics and was interested in art, especially miniatures and books. During the 1500s, illustrated albums with images of exotic scenes and figures were very popular in Europe (Cole 1972, 61). They did not just document travels but also represented the travellers’ personal interpretation and experience of the places and people they encountered. These albums played a major role in shaping European attitudes towards non-western cultures by illustrating these people’s daily life, places, portraits, customs and traditions.

Figure 6. Installation View of The Art of Travel: Bartholomäus Schachman 1559–1614 exhibition, 2012. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022.

The travel album of Bartholomäus Schachman, dated 1590, consists of 105 full-page watercolour and pencil drawings on paper. A careful examination of the different drawing styles suggests that they were painted by more than one artist, probably by three different hands (Nefedova, Al Mana, and Al Faihani 2012, 65). Our presentation of the exhibition was designed to play a role in shifting the focus of the audience from seeing the images as stereotypes towards seeing them as products of a more nuanced and constructive cross-cultural interaction.

In 2013 the exhibition Heritage of Art Diplomacy: Memoirs of an Ambassador, organised by the Orientalist Museum (now Lusail Museum), took place in the Museum of Islamic Art (Figure 7). The exhibition displayed four rare seventeenth century paintings commissioned by Hans-Ludwig von Kuefstein, the Habsburg Ambassador in Istanbul, after his diplomatic mission in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The paintings were all attributed to Franz Hörmann and Hans Gemminger (assisted by Valentin Müller) who joined the embassy delegation on 1 Mar 1628 (Nefedova 2013, 42). Found neglected in a chateau in France under very poor environmental conditions for centuries, the paintings underwent extensive research and restoration for two years in Vienna prior to this exhibition. The exhibition shed light on the role that works of art played in international diplomacy: as diplomatic gifts and as a means to document different aspects of the mission.

Figure 7. Installation View of Heritage of Art Diplomacy: Memoires of an Ambassador exhibition, 2013. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022.

In addition to presenting these little-known paintings, this exhibition had an additional and equally important objective: to raise the awareness and capture the interest of Qatari nationals in the field of cultural heritage. It introduced the audience to the museum work done behind the scenes by researchers and restorers. As Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of Qatar Museums (2013) explained in the forward of the exhibition catalogue (13):

[…] one of the foremost ongoing social, educational and cultural responsibilities of a museum is to safeguard the cultural heritage – that is, its preservation for the inspiration and the benefit of both present and future generations. Restoration and conservation processes are increasingly recognized as being an important driver in the field of public awareness and education […]

A visitor survey was conducted during these three exhibitions, showing that most visitors were residents but not nationals of Qatar. This emphasized the fact that Qatari nationals are not familiar with the world of museums, and perhaps that they feel little connection with Orientalist art.

 As a consequence, Qatar Museums has set its target to fulfill the cultural goals of the 2030 National Vision, as stated on the Qatar Museums’ website under ‘our vision’: ‘playing an integral role in the development of an innovative, diverse, progressive nation by fostering the creativity, cultural knowledge and empathy of its people.’ HE Sheikha Al Mayassa, chairperson of Qatar Museums, emphasized that ‘[w]e are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions. It is important for us to grow organically’ (Qatar Museums 2013). Despite their lack of attendance to art museums, people in Qatar are very sensitive to, and interested in, their past and heritage. Linking the new museum to their past is essential in engaging their attention and support.

Expansion and diversification of the collection

The feedback from our first few exhibitions, combined with the new vision for Qatar Museums, provided the motivation to rethink the concept of the museum. The museum is now envisaged to present the interaction between East and West and how the different cultures have interpreted each other from the sixteenth century up to now. This has required an expansion in the collection to reflect these cross-cultural relations in the work of contemporary artists from the West as well as from local regions to reflect the impact of cross-cultural exchange on artistic practices. For example, we want to show the influence of the hybrid identities of the artists on their response to colonialism or post-colonialism through new interpretations of regional events that subvert historically established stereotypes. Contemporary artists newly added to the collection will include Kader Attia, who grew up between Paris and Algeria, and who developed his interest in intercultural and interdisciplinary research to infuse his art works with a new perspective; David Hockney, whose works undermine the conventions of British Orientalist art; and Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair, whose works combine elements of Islamic aesthetics with Western abstraction.

Geographically, Qatar has a unique position on the map that places it at the nexus of two major sea routes and three continents. Such a location affords a special position and valuable location for cultural diplomacy. In line with that status, the museum will look at the stories of cultural representations and reciprocal appropriation between the greater Middle East and North Africa, and its peripheries, be they in Europe, Africa or Asia. Therefore, a broader perspective will be examined, ranging far beyond the colonial history that has shaped Edward Said’s theory. By acknowledging the ideas that shaped the opposing concepts of East and West, while also broadening our approach, the new museum aims to uncover the many different cultural threads within these regions, their intertwined nature, and the patterns that bind them together. The new museum at Lusail will aim for a nuanced approach, re-evaluating the past and unveiling the unseen in the works of Orientalist artists. The museum should be a place of exploration and learning, acknowledging but going beyond the narrative of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1997), to focus on the unexpected moments of rapport between cultures and nations: a place to deconstruct and explain perceptions and tensions between the East and West, an international hub open to people from all over the world to come and explore new interpretations of the relationship between East and West.

The museum will present Qatar Museums curatorial team’s vision of Orientalism by way of a chronological journey that will start from the pre-Islamic era and extend to the twenty-first century, introducing audiences to a variety of experiences, providing them with context, and challenging received wisdom surrounding cross-cultural encounters, exchanges and influences. Below are some examples of how Qatar Museums will offer different perspectives on the subject.

The first point of recontextualization concerns ancient Egypt. We will present this material alongside the responses that emerged after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the publication Of Description de l’Égypte in 1809, during the time of Europe and America’s enduring Egyptomania, which saw Egyptian motifs pervade nineteenth-century interior design, decorative arts, jewelry, and fashion. The inspiration provided by ancient Egypt was further enhanced in 1923 after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun by the British archeologist Howard Carter (1874–1939) (Whitehouse 1997–1, 158–161). In the early twentieth century, the growth of mass production brought new audiences to appreciate the creative achievements of ancient Egypt and gave them access to a vast array of Egyptian-influenced materials.

The collection includes significant items of Egyptomania from the golden age of Hollywood, such as the original painting used for one of the promotional posters for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s famous film Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor (Figure 8). In the movie, the costuming and Elizabeth Taylor’s fashion and her gold-beaded headdress were based on the attire worn by men and women in ancient Egypt, particularly in the period between 1480 and 1350 B.C. (Robins 1999, 55–69), and provided a source of fascination for designers and the beauty industry. Our collection also includes material from the hairdressing department for this film, allowing us to present a link between the artworks of ancient Egypt and the modern fashion and beauty industries.

Figure 8. Original painting for the ‘Cleopatra’ film poster, 1963, acrylic paint, 69.9 × 80 mm. Courtesy of General Collections, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [IMM.PH.FM.21530.01].

Secondly, the museum also explores the role played by the Middle East and North Africa as a source of inspiration for the West. The museum has a portrait of a lady in Turkish dress thought to be either Laura Tarsi, mistress of the British Marquess of Granby (1721–1770) who was living in Constantinople in the 1740s, or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Figure 9). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompanied her husband Edward Wortley Montagu when he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716 (Wharncliffe 2011 [1866], 13), and upon her return to England in 1718, she introduced Turkish styles of dress and began advocating and publicizing the Turkish practice of inoculation. Both introductions were shocking in London society, but over time they were both adopted and soon spread throughout Europe. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, in her book Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (2015, 242) and Adam Geczy in Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (2013, 69) put forward a view that Eastern dress was considered morally superior to Western dress for being more comfortable, more practical and less susceptible to the whims of fashion. Montagu, who was painted several times in Oriental dress, found it lighter and smoother, and that it freed her from the painful whalebone in corsets and bustles. Therefore, her appearance in Oriental dress was, literally and metaphorically, a call for social and somatic freedom little known to Western European women at the time.

Figure 9. Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Lady in Turkish Dress, c. 1750, 10.2 × 8.3 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum. Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.750].

This example reflects what Vladimir Braginsky states in his article Rediscovering the ‘Oriental’ in the Orient and Europe: Western artists were not only attracted to the East, but they found in it the remedy for the illness of their own culture (Braginsky 1997, 515). This was especially the case for European women travelling to the Middle East. Hsu-Ming Teo pointed out the role played by feminist theorists in complicating Said’s binary interpretation through their readings of the women travellers’ representations of the East: ‘[n]o attention was paid to how European women’s changing political, legal and professional status over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might affect their representations of the Oriental other’ (2013, 13). The museum seeks to convey some of this more nuanced interpretation of the experience of female travellers and how their representations of the Orient were used for constructive purposes by reformers once they returned to Europe.

Every culture appropriates and borrows from the other what it needs for its development. It is possible to see this in the exchanges of knowledge and experience that took place: the East proved to be essential for the West, just as the West was highly influential on the East (Braginsky 1997, 515). The Ottoman Empire, in search of ways to reform itself to adapt to a changing world, looked to European systems for inspiration, and as a result developed the Ottoman Empire reforms, Tanzimat, in the period between 1839 and 1876. The Tanzimat aimed to transform from the old to the modern state following the principles of the European system (Deringil 1998; Karpat 1972). Our collection contains examples of this process, including a watercolour of Sultan Abdulmecid in a Westernized military costume, symbolizing his embrace of a European style of modernity (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Print from Sir David Wilkie’s Sketches in Turkey, Syria, & Egypt, 1840 & 1841 (London: C. Hullmandel, 1843), folio, tinted lithographed title finished by hand in colour, 54.6 × 44 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [LB.180].

A related and important topic for the new museum is the impact of these cross-cultural exchanges on fashion, since ‘[f]ashion has always been just another manifestation of our shared global heritage as human beings’ (Knox 2011, 9). The interactions between East and West have resulted in innovative designs represented through the interplay of different textiles, colour palettes, beading, embroidery and other culturally specific crafts with Western sartorial traditions, pattern-cutting and tailoring.

A significant new acquisition by the museum is an item from fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s Eye collection for Spring/Summer 2000: Look number 4. McQueen is known for his detailed research (Welcox 2015, 179), and his Eye collection in New York provoked considerable controversy because of its references to the crusades, and the twentieth century Middle East oil industry combined with Ottoman silhouettes and symbols. For the show, ‘models walked through water over a black catwalk, the liquid symbolizing Middle Eastern oil’ (Welcox 2015, 311). McQueen’s frequently controversial fashion shows pull together multiple cultural elements from cinema, dance and performance art. Our interest in this item for the collection was its ability to convey a juxtaposition of contrasting elements that speaks to our interpretation of the continued relevance of an East–West exchange: tradition and modernity, fragility and strength, concealment and liberalization. In this work, the designer represents the contrast between the concealment of the Middle Eastern female body, seen in the long scarf sleeves and trousers with high scooped hems, and Western liberalization through fetishistic studded leather harnesses that expose the breasts. He blends these apparently incompatible elements from two different cultures together to present the viewer with a garment that takes inspiration from covered-up women to express freedom. It represents the role fashion plays in translating cultural conflicts in aesthetic terms. ‘I am not an aggressive person, but I do want to change attitudes,’ said Alexander McQueen (Welcox 2015, 221).

A final element of our museum strategy is to focus on aspects of heritage. Qatar nationals are strongly bound to their heritage and expect museums to relate to their past, link it to their present and to be relevant to their future. The museum at Lusail needs to be in touch with the tangible reality, not only the intangible memory. Thus, talking about the relationship between the East and West in both a historical context and a contemporary one is essential to how we frame the story.

Representation of horses is an example of the East–West cultural and artistic exchange that is strongly bound to the region’s culture. In 1992, Qatar established an equestrian centre, Al Shaqab, that made Qatar a leading player in the preservation of the Arabian horse bloodline and promoted the country as a significant location for equine education and equestrian sports.

In the seventeenth century, a significant number of Arabian horses were imported from Africa and the Middle East to breeding farms of England. Three horse breeds, the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian, became progenitors of the modern thoroughbred racehorses, significant impacting the horseracing industry (Olen and Culbertson 2010, 85).² A coloured print of the Godolphin (Figure 11) by William Mackenzie is in our collection alongside multiple works by Lady Anne Blunt who, with her husband Wilfrid Blunt, founded the Crabbet stud in Sussex, England, where they developed a breeding program for Arabian horses. The Blunts travelled to the Middle East and sojourned in the desert where they learnt about Bedouin horsemanship and acquired desert-bred horses.

Figure 11. William Mackenzie, Pure Arabian/The Godolphin Barb, 24.5 × 31.7 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Doha, Qatar Museums, 2022 [OM.1132].

During the trip, Lady Anne, who had studied painting with the famous critic John Ruskin, produced watercolours and sketches documenting her travels and the horses she had seen. Her drawings were reproduced in books describing her journeys: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates and A Pilgrimage to Nejd. Her daughter, Lady Judith Wentworth, followed in her footsteps in the twentieth century and wrote encyclopedic books about the Arabian Horse and its depiction in art.

Horses were also an important Romantic theme for artists in the nineteenth century, offering a subject capable of conveying dramatic motion that many artists sought to express in their works. Important works of this kind in our collection include Théodore Géricault’s Turk Mount on a Burnt Chestnut Horse, ca. 1810 (Figure 12) and Eugène Delacroix’s Arab Horseman at the Gallop, 1849 (Figure 13). These artists, like many others, undertook studies of equine anatomy to enhance their knowledge of horses and produce images of Eastern horses that provide insights into the horse as a creature of feeling and beauty (Trapp 1988). These two works, similar to the case of Van Dongen mentioned above, are good examples of the influence that the East had on the development of artistic movements in Europe. These two paintings share the Romantic ardour through depicting the agitated movement of the horses and light short brushstrokes which reflect speed, alongside using an intense colour palette juxtaposing the three primary colours with their complementary colours (Lee 2015, 178–179).

Figure 12. Théodore Géricault, Turc monté sur un cheval alezan brûlé Turk Mount on a Burnt Chestnut Horse c. 1810, 37.7 × 45.7 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.984].

Figure 13. Eugène Delacroix, Un Cavalier Arabe au Galop [Arab Horseman at the Gallop], 1849, 54 × 45.1 cm. Courtesy of Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha, 2022 [OM.1].

Furthermore, the Arabian horse is relevant in the local context because of its association with hunting and falconry. Equine hunting of wild animals using trained birds has been a royal and noble pursuit in many cultures. In the nineteenth century the hunt was emblematic of the Orient for Romantic and Orientalist artists and became a motif prominently depicted in painting and sculpture. Falconry has a strong significance in the Gulf region and particularly in Qatar as both intangible cultural heritage (recognized by UNESCO) and as a sport that is still being taught, practiced, and competed in. Arab falconers introduced many new practices to Western Europe, like training the hunting falcons by covering their eyes with hoods. The new museum’s display of an assemblage of contemporary falconry equipment and fittings (such as falconer’s glove, the bird leash, and the bird hood) will build on the connection between European Orientalist imagery of falconry and contemporary culture.

Today, in a time where forces of globalization continue to impact the cultural geography of the East and West, the idea of the Orient is shifting again. We see it as a complex set of ideas and network of actors that is embedded within both our historical and contemporary culture and society. Qatar Museums hopes to create a place of knowledge production and dissemination, as well as a learning institution that brings a unique and new perspective to the world, with a critical approach that is relevant to its local population and an international audience from the Arabian Gulf.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kholood Al-Fahad

Kholood Al-Fahad is Curator of Fashion at the Lusail Museum, part of Qatar Museums, in Doha. She obtained her Master of Arts in Museum and Gallery Practice in 2013 at University College London. Al-Fahad published ‘A Merchant of the Levant Company, Aleppo Beyond by Andrea Soldi,’ in the Syria Matters exhibition catalogue, 2019.

Notes

1 Qatar Museums possesses the oil on canvas version of John Frederick Lewis’s A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai. A watercolour version is in the Mellon Collection.

2 For further information about the importation of Arabian horses to Europe, see Landry (2009). For further reading about the representation of horses in art, literature and mythology, as well as its role in the history of civilization, see Curtis and Tallis (2012).