Pride and prejudice: In praise of Britain's colonial artists

I flew over to the USA in March this year, for the first time since September 11. An indefinable fear combined with fury over Iraq had kept me away for too long. The launch of the new American Empire, as morally corrupt as the old European hegemony, required severance of connections for a while, a self-imposed banishment.

Art helped to break that spell; more precisely, an invitation from the Yale Centre for British Art and Tate Britain to see an audacious new exhibition of work by 19th-century British Orientalist painters who flourished and prospered during that period of Western hubris and Arab resentment, control and subjugation. Though generally orderly on the surface, an unstable mix of pride and prejudice suffused through the governed lands of the Middle East. These paintings were always more than paintings.

The exhibition, titled The Lure of the East, comes now to Tate Britain, at a time of dangerous global unease. At the start of the 21st century, that ignoble past returned with vengeance; old enmities, long held in check, exploded. A virtual war was declared between civilisations, mutual demonisation naturally followed. The assault on Iraq reawakened memories of colonial manipulation and humiliation throughout the Middle East.

I believed this show would confirm for me the history that never passes, and also affirm Edward Said's critique of the Orientalist mind. His book on the subject denounced suprem-acist European ethnographers, writers, explorers and by implication painters, who were obsessed with "mysterious" Arabia and sought to describe it through their eyes. He wrote: "Orientalism is a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them"). All that had gone before was distilled into this discourse which, while purporting to be a neutral comparison between the Occident and the Orient, was an expression of power relationships."

The writer Rana Kabbani believes Said is even more prescient today: "Orientalism has always rested on the peculiar premise that the West knows more about the Orient than the Orient knows about itself. This premise, most starkly obvious in political discourse and disastrously so in today's White House also underlies the 'softer' area of painting, too."

Too right, I thought. I went prepared only to detest the artists for presuming that through beauty they could deny the unforgivable truth. These were men in their times, of their times, upholders of illegitimate imperial privilege.

All expectations fell away as I gazed upon painting after painting, many of which seemed, to my eye, expressions of undeclared love of the Middle East by white, Christian, upper-class gents, their secret pain and longings, the conflict between head and heart, between Antony and Cleopatra.

Nick Tromans, the curator, says the pictures could be seen "as an antidote to the lazy and ignorant repetition of received wisdom" about Arab life. I think the story is more profound. In her catalogue essay , the Muslim feminist writer Fatima Mernissi notices the presence of the night, shade and dusk in the Orientalist imagination: "Could it be that the Westerner is frightened of Muslims because they mirror his own unconscious side? Were they perhaps enchanted precisely with the 'dark' or unconscious qualities of Islam that in their own civilisations were connected to danger?" Yet there is little fear in most of these compositions; rather, you sense the lure, the respect, even envy.

The fabulous paintings of John Frederick Lewis reveal exactly that enchantment. He V C spent many years in Egypt, unlike some painters who imagined they knew Arab life because they'd pored over documents and anthropological accounts. Yet even Lewis, entranced, willing, who tried to reach the Egyptian soul, seemed to know he'd never get there.

In The Carpet Seller, the merchant is Lewis, though this is not acknowledged. In embroidered pantaloons, high sash and untidy turban, he sits on a stool, obviously frustrated. He is cradling a sword. "I want to belong," the image says, "but can't, not here, not really." Richard Dadd's Seated Man with Chibouk and Sir Thomas Phillips Reclining in Eastern Costume reveal men whose faces speak of that same homelessness. (This is not the case with some absurd, dressed-up portraits in the show, including the famous one of Byron in Albanian costume by Thomas Phillips. They are shallow and arrogant.)

A more contemplative view of exclusion is Lewis's A Lady Receiving Visitors. This is a place of fragile gentility. The painter, male and white, is not allowed in, would not get such a reception, but he imagines it beautifully, wistfully.

My favourite is Interior of a Mosque, Afternoon Prayer. In these indoor pictures by Lewis, you sense ghostly, emotional wanderings, the tragic search in darkness and sequestered spaces, where light is poetry and dance. Bearded Arab men in these pictures are sagacious and noble, not ugly, excitable terrorists; homes and mosques are tranquil, not full of plots. Knowing that, as foreign rulers, they have to forsake intimacy with the ruled, they crave that forbidden contact and create it on canvas. The Empire, says Mernissi, may have programmed them to hate idleness and "moony nights in chaos-inducing realms", but many Orientalists were beguiled by the cultures they were meant to deride.

Some besotted artists paint exquisite landscapes, songs of praise in the desert. Edward Lear's vision of Petra is preternaturally empty and inviting; Richard Dadd's The Halt in the Desert, a camp at night, is breathtakingly beautiful; and William Holman Hunt's The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem during Ramadhan is one of the finest examples of cultural homage. Frederic Leighton's exteriors are love letters (Old Damascus, Courtyard in Algiers). These artists, you feel, look towards eternity and possibilities of reconciliation.

But what of the harem paintings, vivid in the distorted Western imagination, evidence of Eastern lasciviousness? The oversexed, macho, deceitful Saracen who imprisons and uses helpless females is an enduring mythical monster. Here, too, there is more than meets the eye. Occidental males have always themselves wanted to unclothe and leer at Muslim females, to break through prohibitions. It makes them feel manly. Maybe these painters wanted to believe these woman were not unsexed like Victorian ladies. The harems on canvas are their fantasies. The men would not have had access, and so the entire body of work is condemned as voyeuristic and filthy by post-colonial critics.

Up to a point, the pictures are voyeuristic; they invite us to look upon those not meant for our prying eyes. But the artists some at any rate, certainly Lewis in his Harem may be assisting those Arab women to escape control, subverting societies that deny them power and sexuality. In this picture, most of the concubines look petulant or cynical, except for the newest acquisition who is young, dark and vulnerable. You feel, she too will harden up one day. One of the most telling harem pictures is by a woman, Henrietta Brown. Called A Visit: Harem Interior, Constantinople, 1860, it shows an obsequious white woman dressed in Eastern garb bowing to the ladies, who are almost all disdainful and distant. These, you feel, are not women who accept victimhood.

To keep them hidden is to keep them objectified, in their place. What if some of the women want the attention of strangers? Like Leila, a woman gorgeous in red and gold, painted by Frank Dicksee sensuous, sated, lips hot, the eyes open and knowing. In a burqa, she would be nothing. Here, she dominates our senses and we smell her and her lilies. Genuine intoxication and, dare I say, admiration may have motivated many of the British harem painters.

So is this then a clean bill of health for the show? No. Some paintings are crude manifestations of minds misshapen by the desert and perhaps opiates, certainly colonial ignorance. Take William Holman Hunt's The Lantern Maker's Courtship, a raw, creepy scene where the suitor pushes his hand into the veiled face of a compliant, yet nervous woman. Then there is William Allan's The Slave Market, Constantinople, an example of ghastly, propaganda art. Captured white women and their babies give off the glow of translucent divinity while the swarthy customers are opaque, ignorant boors, peering grotesquely at the flesh for sale. We're meant to imagine what happens next as white skin is mounted and tainted by blackness.

Arab slavery was an evil that went on too long, but this nation pioneered industrial slavery. The smug righteousness of the painter is evident. To Allan, Arabs enslaving white women are inherently more evil than white slave owners who raped and commodified black women and men. However, the most offensive British Orientalists were never as base as their French counterparts. Jean-Lon Grôme's For Sale: Slaves at Cairo is abhorrent. His naked, physically corrupted female slaves seem to crawl out of the artist's own sordid impulses. Ingres's Turkish Baths is an example of that cultural arrogance, the disrespect, present still in France.

I detested a number of the formal portraits, those that display mercantile capitalism's loot, framed evidence of the hypocrisy of imperialists who coveted fine Eastern things and clothes while despising those who owned and made them. The conceit of it. Oh, the proud Captain Colin Mackenzie, painted by James Sant, in his finery and flash turban, Arabian sword and carved scabbard, looking quite the Pasha and Elizabeth Young in Eastern Costume by David Wilkie, again adorned in luxurious fabrics and jewellery. But, in the middle of the meaningless excess, you find Augustus John's exquisite portrait of TE Lawrence (painted in 1919, so later than the others) dressed in noble Arabian robes and cloaks, the emblematic man of that conflicted world, committed to both yet loyal to neither, holding within him a cavernous loneliness.

Walking through the galleries at Yale, therefore, was quite an emotional journey. There were moments of ire, even repressed rage, but so many more pictures pleased and moved, made me question my own previously facile presumptions. Said's clear and still valid Orientalist template didn't fit every frame.

Yale curator Emily Weeks believes the moment has arrived for just this re-assessment: "Despite the polemical and political interpretations that many Orientalist works have attracted in recent years, and though the genre has consequently become the most presupposed and predetermined of all British art, these paintings have in fact much left to tell. Criticisms levelled at British society, once glossed over, await revelation; personal narratives, experiences and idiosyncrasies, long ignored in favour of an examination of broader imperial designs, look forward to articulation; and perhaps most importantly, genuine moments of cross-cultural understanding and respect and commemoration have yet to be restored to the historical record."

Look how far we are now from that understanding. Among today's Western elite, that lure of the East, that fine sensibility, is all but gone; only a few stoic souls enter the heart of Islamic cultures with humility and affection. Muslim painters try to capture the connections between East and West, but most mainstream British artists refrain, perhaps are wary of the places brought home by the Orientalists.

The Orientalists many, not all were the visionaries of their times. The new age of empire has not inspired such subtle and seditious art. The post-September 11 deluge took away possibilities, and appears to have paralysed artists and dreamers. What a terrible tragedy.

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888), 4 June to 31 August