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Although little has
been written about him, he was in fact one of the
pioneers of Orientalism and was the first artist to
travel to the region. His travels were extensive and
included Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and countries of the
Middle East. His family’s wealth enabled him to finance
these travels and also to build up an extraordinary
collection of clothes, carpets, trinkets and other
objects to be used as props in paintings. He always
visited Bazaars on his travels and picked up artifacts
of every description.
Paris in the mid nineteenth century had a fascination in
artistic circles, for Middle East and Arab life, as well
as Islamic art. By the mid nineteenth century Parisians
became used to seeing reconstructions of Mosques, Arab
Villages and Bazaars in the annual exhibitions in the
city. |
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When he came to having
his own studio he filled it with so many objects from
his travels to the Orient that it was said to resemble a
Bazaar.
It is not only his studio which housed his collections;
his own home also contained magnificent collections of
ceramics, weapons, glassware and costumes. He held many
memorable gatherings there with his unique collections
providing the background.
He was a generous figure and rather than hoard his
collections he was happy to lend them to any artists or
students who needed his costumes or any trinkets he had
gathered. The artists that used them the most were those
that painted in the Romantic style.
He was a very good friend of the great Romantic painter,
Eugene Delacroix and provided him with the props and
costumes for his wonderful painting, ‘The Plague Victims
of Jaffa.’ He was also friends with the painter Theodore
Gericault who has been described as the leader of the
Romantic school and who produced such great work of arts
such as the ‘Raft of Medusa’ which showed the dying
survivors of a ship wreck in Morocco and caused a huge
political scandal at the time. |
