This talk draws on research from the current exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’.
In the nineteenth century, the Middle East was a new destination to experience colour. Unsurprisingly, artists were at the forefront of this new wave of mass British tourism. They went in search of the opportunity to discern an altogether new understanding of the relationship between environment, colour, and light. Victorian artists approached the colours of the Orient with reverence and the receptiveness of a willing student. However, the idea of the alterity of Eastern colour, that it was somehow different to the colours of the West, implies the same divisive hierarchy Edward Said first identified in Orientalism (1978).
However, colour also offers, to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term, a contact zone ‘a social space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’ as well as Natasha Eaton’s notion of the ‘chromozone’. In this sense, colour was an active agent that confronted and clung to British artists’ palettes and canvases in transformative ways. As Frederic Leighton wrote as he watched a Damascene sunset, ‘It has dyed our spirits in colours that can never be washed out.’
This paper will closely read the work of several key British Orientalists featured in the exhibition to understand the role of colour in a selection of depictions of the Middle East. It will explore the way colour was used to convey Orientalist themes and how artists adapted the idea of a chromatic education in global and inter-imperial contexts.
Biography
Dr Madeline Hewitson is the research assistant for the ERC-funded project, Chromotope: the 19th century chromatic turn and current exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’. She was awarded a doctorate in History of Art at the University of York in 2020 for her thesis entitled ‘A Relief from Classicism: Frederic Leighton in the Near East, 1857-1895’. Her wider research focuses on Victorian visual culture across painting, sculpture and the decorative arts with a focus on British Orientalism.
Followed by a drinks reception
(open to all)
