Allure of the East

Recently I introduced a series of concerts in Leighton House, home of the Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, set in a secluded part of Kensington. In effect it’s a grand artist’s studio, replete with the kind of images and artefacts to set a creative mind working. At its heart is the stunning Arab Hall, filled with textiles, pottery and images Leighton collected during his trips to Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Damascus in the 1860s and ’70s, and furnished with exquisite tiles, mosaics and marbles mostly made in London but closely modelled on the kind of things Leighton had seen during his Middle-Eastern travel.

There’s a contemporary school of thought that says that Western Europeans like me should feel uncomfortable about all this. And I do – a little. Since the publication of Edward Said’s provocative book in 1978 there’s been a lot of discussion – some of it pretty rancorous – about how objects like Leighton House allegedly reflect a patronising attitude to the East on the part of greedy, power-intoxicated Western colonial minds. It doesn’t matter whether Leighton took these objects from the Middle East