Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky

The Orient preoccupied countless 19^th century artists, including Konstantin Makovsky, who traveled to Cairo in 1873.  Among the most important works from this period is Makovsky's 1876 masterpiece Transportation of the Holy Carpet from Mecca to Cairo, Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg. 

The Orientalists were inspired by the exotic cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. French artists were particularly enamored of the Orient: Jean-Léon Gérôme traveled extensively in North Africa and painted what he had seen.  The Paris Salon also popularized the genre by showing many works by Gérôme and his fellow Orientalists.  These artists created spectacularly exotic canvases full of light and color of people both imagined and real.  Unlike many armchair Orientalists, whose compositions were created in studios using props and photographs,  Makovsky, like Gérôme, painted based on his travels and then supplemented his compositions with the thousands of props and costumes in his collection.