ABSTRACT
The artists, mainly painters, associated with the orientalist genre, who travelled so widely in the Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not for the most part agents of empire, and far from denigrating the peoples and cultures of the Near East, almost all attempted in one way or another to glorify them. The numbers of European artists visiting the Levant and North Africa in the nineteenth century, particularly in the middle years, is remarkable. Several French artists are said to have accompanied the French army that occupied Algiers in 1830; and in 1832, Eugene Delacroix joined the Comte de Mornay on a diplomatic mission to Meknes in Morocco. In John MacKenzie's view, no clear correlation can be established between the evolution of orientalism in the arts in the nineteenth century and the rise of European, mainly British and French, imperialism in the Near East.
