The Orientalist’s

The Orientalist Art movement personifies the work of European artists who documented life in Egypt, and the Holy Land, during the 19th Century when Asia Minor was referred to as the Orient.

Jean- Leon Gerome, David Roberts and Eugene Delacroix, among many other celebrated Orientalist’s, incorporated the dramatic lighting, exotic costumes and architecture of the Middle East in their paintings, as they accompanied archeologists and explorers on important military campaigns.

The Orientalist movement was very popular among the European aristocracy, and artists such as Alma Tadema and William Holman Hunt became extremely wealthy and influential. Their work exerted a resounding influence on European culture during the Victorian Era. Horace Verne, one of the first Orientalists lived two generations before other artists, of the same genre, and the movement spanned almost a hundred years until the advent of Impressionism.

Ivan Lloyd’s authentic knowledge of Islamic designs, in the Orientalist tradition, is gained from the twenty years he lived among the people of North Africa and India studying their culture. He is uniquely qualified to interweave the art of the Persian culture, with its distinctive use of refined floral designs and carpet motifs, with the noticeably different Arabesque calligraphy and architecture of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.