Orientalist school of the 19th century.
"On the outskirts of the city".
Oil on hardboard.
Size: 28 x 37 cm; 49,5 x 59 cm (frame).
Orientalism was born in the 19th century as a consequence of the romantic spirit of escape in time and space. The first Orientalists sought to reflect the lost, the unattainable, in a dramatic journey destined from the outset to fail. Like Flaubert in "Salambo", painters painted detailed portraits of the Orient and imagined pasts, recreated down to the last millimetre but ultimately unknown and idealised. During the second half of the 19th century, however, many of the painters who travelled to the Middle East in search of this invented reality discovered a different and new country, which stood out with its peculiarities above the clichés and prejudices of Europeans. Thus, this new school of Orientalism left behind the beautiful odalisques, harems and slave markets to paint nothing but what they saw, the real East in all its everyday dimensions. Along with the change of vision came a technical and formal change; since it was no longer a question of recreating an imagined world in all its details, the brushstroke became more impressionistic, and the artists focused less on depicting types and customs than on faithfully reflecting the atmosphere of the place, the very identity of the North African populations.