David Roberts, whose speciality was architectural and topographical paintings, was one of the first independent artists to visit the Near East. His journey, made amid conditions of discomfort...

John Frederick Lewis was perhaps the most gifted of English artists to paint in the East, with an almost obsessive precision and wealth of detail. His watercolour and gouache entitled The Hhareem created a sensation...

Jules Laurens, from an artistic family, attended the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier at an early age. He worked for Baudouin, a scene-painter in the local municipal theatre, before going to Paris to  study with Paul Delaroche.

Generations of English children were brought up on Edward Lear's Nonsense Rhymes, limericks and songs, but few knew the story of the extraordinary life of this many-sided genius, the most endearing of the nineteenth-century travellers. 

Although Narcisse Berchere was never a celebrity, he nevertheless has his place in the history of Orientalism, as much for his deep attachment to the desert as for his paintings.

Alfred Dehodencq referred to himself as being the last of the Romantics. But despite his taste for movement, drama and violence, his preoccupation with individual physiognomies and his detailed reporting of each individual in crowd...

Thomas Seddon was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the few pictures he painted of the Near East before his untimely death belong more in feeling and technique to this group than to the mainstream Orientalists.

The darling of the Orientalist movement and lion of international artistic circles, JeanLéon Gérome was, during the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the most famous painters in the world.

Charles Vacher de Tournemine's Orientalist paintings are typical of the majority exhibited at the Paris Salons during the 1850s and 1860s; pleasant genre scenes in rich tones which pleased...

Alberto Pasini's technical skill, sense of colour harmony and excellent treatment of light make one regret that his delightful paintings are so rarely to be found. Born in the duchy of Parma,

Alfred Chataud was one of the first painters to settle in Algeria, and although he died virtually unknown, he sowed the seeds of the artistic movement which was to become the School of Algiers in the 1920s.

A pupil of the Antwerp Academy from 1843 to 1849, Jan-Baptist Huysmans exhibited for the first time in that city in 1850. After 1856, he made a number of journeys to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine

Adolf Schreyer, a specialist in riders and horses in rural settings, both in Eastern Europe and North Africa, was enormously popular with the German aristocracy, as well as with millionaire American collectors such as Vanderbilt, Astor, Rockefeller and Morgan.