Head of an Arab

Head of an Arab from 1818 at the Hermitage shows Vernet's early engagement with Orientalist subjects before his extensive North African travels. Such character studies established his repertoire of Eastern types. Horace Vernet's fluent oil technique allowed rapid execution of large-scale battle scenes and Orientalist compositions with a journalistic immediacy that his contemporaries found both exciting and, to some academic critics, superficial. Horace Vernet's Oriental subjects combined his personal experience of North Africa (he visited Algeria during the French colonial campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s) with the Romantic fascination with the Islamic world as a theater of both contemporary military adventure and ancient Biblical history. His Algerian paintings documented the French colonial campaign while participating in the Orientalist tradition of European painters who found in the North African landscape and culture the visual stimulus that Delacroix had found in Morocco. The combination of journalistic documentation and Romantic imagination that characterized the best Orientalist painting of his generation was Vernet's particular specialty.

The head study is rendered with careful observation and warm palette. Vernet's handling captures the subject's features with documentary precision.