Field Notes: On Oriental Light

In the museum at Cannes, I paused before a painting by Henri Léopold Lévy, a biblical tableau rendered through the visual language of nineteenth-century Orientalism. The accompanying label explained how Lévy, a Jewish artist trained in the French academic tradition, turned to subjects from the Old Testament as a way to navigate the Christian cultural mainstream and gain recognition from the State. Yet beyond these historical considerations, what drew my attention was the quality of light—the filtered luminosity through which Europe imagined the East.

Henri Léopold Lévy

As the exhibition text reminds us, for the intellectuals and artists of 19th-century Europe, travel to the Orient became a true rite of passage. Until the 1850s, such journeys were perilous adventures, but the inventions of the industrial era—railways, steam navigation, and the telegraph—made these distant lands increasingly accessible.

Tinco Lycklama à Nijeholt (1837–1900), a Dutch aristocrat, was among the first of these “tourists” driven by a passion for the exotic. From his travels through Iran, the Near East, and Egypt, he brought back an exceptional collection, which he donated to the City of Cannes in 1877.

Indeed, the text goes on to explain that this fascination with ancient civilizations and Arab-Persian culture gave rise to a romantic current—Orientalism—through which artists and writers projected visions of a dreamlike or experienced East. Standing in that gallery, surrounded by these works, I began to see Tiffany’s story not as an American exception but as part of this larger continuum of European longing and rediscovery.

Emile Vernet-Lecomte (1821-1900) and Pierre Tetar Van Elven (1828-1908)

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s own journey to North Africa and the Levant was not a decorative curiosity but a form of artistic initiation—a modern counterpart to Lycklama’s voyages. Immersed in Islamic architecture and the chromatic structures of glass and tile, Tiffany absorbed a vocabulary of pattern, translucence, and geometry that would later define both his designs and Laurelton Hall, his Long Island residence. The sensibility he brought home to America was not imported wholesale but transformed through the prism of personal experience and technological modernity—the same forces that made the East newly accessible to European travelers.

This fascination with the “Oriental” extended beyond the visual arts. Decades earlier, George Bridgetower—a prodigious mixed-race violinist—had been presented to the courts of Europe adorned in turbans and silks, his costume amplifying the sense of the extraordinary. His father, a man of strategic imagination, understood that exoticism carried cultural currency in an age hungry for novelty. When Thomas Jefferson heard the young musician perform in Paris, he admired his virtuosity—but one wonders to what extent the perception of brilliance was refracted through the lens of race and difference, the same fascination that would later color American responses to Tiffany’s Orientalism.

Field Notes: On Oriental Light

Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.