Orientalist painters invented imagery of Eastern despotism they never witnessed

Evidence

Once there, he was quite shocked to find the reality to be quite different from what he had been imagining. His was perhaps the same kind of disappointment that had compelled the Tirolean crèche maker Franz Pernlochner the Senior (1847–95) to construct his work without any reference to the Orient, after he had been to Jerusalem to seek models for his art. Čeloud, however, preferred to solve the cognitive dissonance between orientalist fantasy and a visitor’s reality in favor of the fantasy. He went on working as before, making orientalist references to the Doré tradition rather than to what he himself had seen. He grumbled, for example, that there were too many black sheep in Palestine, and decided to stick to making white ones. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 200 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

When a learned Orientalist traveled in the country of his specialization, it was always with unshakable abstract maxims about the “civilization” he had studied; rarely were Orientalists interested in anything except proving the validity of these musty “truths” by applying them, without great success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate, natives. Finally, the very power and scope of Orientalism produced not only a fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient but also a kind of second-order knowledge—lurking in such places as the “Oriental” tale, the mythology of the mysterious East, notions of Asian inscrutability—with a life of its own, what V. G. Kiernan has aptly called “Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The trend toward the exotic was fueled by the growth of Romanticism, an artistic and philosophical movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The image of an exotic Orient associated with “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, [and] intense energy” can be found in the works of musicians, painters, novelists, and philosophers from Mozart to Byron, Hugo, and Goethe. To be fair, the Romantics did not only look to the East for the exotic: they also looked to their own past, drawing from Gothic tales and stories of European barbarians. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 89 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151; Orientalist artists often preferred inherited fantasy to firsthand observation of the actual Holy Land — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 200; Orientalists claimed authority to reconstruct Eastern traditions without consulting Easterners — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 317 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals #corroborates (0.90) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151
• Orientalist artists often preferred inherited fantasy to firsthand observation of the actual Holy Land #corroborates (0.90) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 200
• Romanticism projected an exotic Orientalist fantasy rather than accurate knowledge #corroborates (0.90) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 89
• Orientalists claimed authority to reconstruct Eastern traditions without consulting Easterners #expands (0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 317
• Orientalist scholarship resurrects and creates its object through philological techniques #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332