Head of an Arab

Head of an Arab, painted in oil on canvas in 1857 and held at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, is an early work from the period when Leighton was beginning to explore the North African and Middle Eastern visual material that would become central to his career. By 1857 he had not yet made his major eastern Mediterranean journeys but had access to visual material through other artists and possibly through encounters in Italy with North African travellers or workers. The head study of an Arab figure participates in the broader Victorian Orientalist tradition of depicting non-European physiognomy as a subject of aesthetic interest and cultural curiosity. Leicester Museum's significant collection of Victorian art includes works by several of the leading painters of the classical revival and Orientalist traditions.

Head studies of North African or Arab subjects in this period combined observational specificity with the Orientalist visual conventions of the European academic tradition. Leighton's 1857 technique was still developing toward the mature confidence of his later work, but his facility in rendering individual facial character was already evident. Costume detail — headscarf, robe — provides cultural specificity while the compositional focus remains on the face itself.