Orientalist painting in the Bassam Freiha Collection

In Abu Dhabi, a collection assembled over more than fifty years explores one of the most debated chapters of 19th-century European painting: Orientalism. Until 17 January 2027, the Bassam Freiha Art Foundation presents Highlights from Bassam Freiha Collection, a selection of works bringing together artists from France, Italy, Russia, Austria, the United Kingdom and the United States. The exhibition examines the visual languages and subjects through which Western painters represented the Middle East and North Africa. Born in Beirut in 1939, Bassam Said Freiha began collecting Orientalist painting in the 1970s. In 1976, he was among the founders of the Mathaf Gallery in London, which specialised in the field, while his personal collection continued to grow through works by European artists active between the 19th and early 20th centuries. Artists represented in the collection include Rudolphe Ernst, Léon Comerre, Paul Leroy, Jan-Baptist Huysmans, Théodore Frère, Fabio Fabbi and Aloysius O'Kelly. Orientalism developed in Europe particularly during the 19th century, fuelled by travel, colonial expansion, the Napoleonic campaigns and the increasing circulation of images and accounts from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. It was not a unified movement, but rather a shared repertoire of subjects: markets and streets, mosques, deserts, warriors, domestic interiors, odalisques and scenes of everyday life. In many cases, direct observation coexisted with studio reconstructions and images strongly shaped by the expectations of Western audiences. The Freiha collection reflects precisely this tension between documentation and imagination. Fabio Fabbi, who trained in Florence and produced numerous scenes set in Egypt, created crowded, narrative compositions; other painters focused instead on architecture, landscape or the human figure. The international backgrounds of the artists also demonstrate how representations of the “Orient” crossed different schools of painting rather than remaining confined to the French tradition most commonly associated with the genre. The exhibition also acquires particular significance from the place in which it is presented. Established in 2024 in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District, the Bassam Freiha Art Foundation is the district’s first private art foundation and was created in part to make collections that would normally remain private accessible to the public. Displaying images of the Arab world produced by Western artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Abu Dhabi today places these works within a region that, directly or indirectly, provided the subjects for the visual world they constructed.