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Bernard, famous in the history of modernism as Gauguin’s collaborator in founding the School of 

Pont-Aven. Doubtless following the example of Gauguin, he fled France in 1893 for Cairo, where

for the next decade he lived the life of an Arabophile cosmopolitan gentleman.24 Bernard’s painting

there began with a Pont-Aven primitivist reinterpretation of the Egyptian fellah. In early Egyptian

pen-and-watercolor drawings like Women at Market (Femmes au marché), these long-robed agricul-

tural workers are flattened forms rendered in radically simplified pen outlines, with no attempt at

modeling. In a more sustained canvas like Arab Festival (Fête arabe) the visual treatment owes some-

thing to Bernard’s cloisonnist handling of fieldworkers in Brittany (making him a second artist to

“Bretonize the fellah”), passed through the screen of Tuscan primitives he had admired in Italy in

1893. After 1898, however, partly as a result of his visits to Italy and a growing disa¤ection with the

modernist project, Bernard developed an idiosyncratic rendering based on his admiration for the

Venetian old masters Tintoretto and Veronese. The style of a canvas like The Hashish Smoker (La

 fumeuse de hachisch) (purchased by Bénédite for the Luxembourg in 1902) only superficially resem-

bles contemporary academic realism. At Bernard’s successful one-man show at Vollard’s in 1901, the

critic for L’Ermitagedistinguished the artist’s new work from that of a literalist like Dinet: “He knows

too well the artistic value of the trompe l’oeil, however remarkable, of a Dinet. More than ever he

interprets, but without his [former] tendency to excess. He aims at being noble, simple . . . austere

and harmonious.”25

Bernard’s sepia-toned, smoky palette persists in his Cairo Merchants(Les marchands du Caire),con-

trasting with the brilliant hues common to both Gérôme-school Orientalism and impressionist painter

travelers (Fig. 38). The frieze-like spatial organization of this very large canvas shows, in the care

exercised in rendering each static figure, an admiration for the decorative approach of quattrocento

and even Byzantine muralists. But the praise Bernard received for his Orientalist works is an indica-tion of his declining reputation with the avant-garde; for Julius Meier-Graefe, the Luxembourg

Hashish Smoker “justifies Gauguin’s severe prophecy that Bernard would yet end with Benjamin Con-

stant.”26 Despite undertaking an exotic expatriation comparable to Gauguin’s, Bernard renounced

the possibility of pioneering an equivalent modernist Orientalism.

One thing that does link Bernard to more academic Orientalist painters is his general avoidance

of literary themes in the Egyptian paintings. Given the importance of literary references in critical

discussions of Orientalist art, it is surprising that so few Orientalists who traveled made such imag-

inative forays. Bénédite and Ary Renan delighted in erudite citations of eighteenth-century Orien-

talist writers, and symbolist critics evoked such key sources in the culture of exoticism as Baudelaire ’spoems, Flaubert’s novels and stories, and the Thousand and One Nights, the last not an Orientalist

composition but a classic of Arabic literature that had been available in French since Galand trans-

lated it about 1710. The so-called Arabian Nights had recently been given new currency in a transla-

tion by the influential Arabist Dr. Joseph Mardrus, serialized in La Revue blanche. When such texts

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