Exhibition review: In pursuit of the exotic

Urban art and Antiquities

Thanks to Lin Wang for sending this to me. The exhibition closes at the end of the month.

19th Century Orientalism paintings have seldom caught my eyes. There is a great painting of Cairo streets by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the Brooklyn Museum. Several other painters, such as Samuel Coleman and Frederich Edwin Church, have visited Egypt or near East. But American painters tended to treat the subject as an alternative choice of landscape with some exotic settings. In the current exhibition “In Pursuit of the Exotic: Artists Abroad in 19th Century Egypt and the Holy Land” at Lubin House, the archeological and architectural merits of Egypt play an important role in the paintings by European artists like Charles Théodore Frère.