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of Clichy to procure the requisite moment of inspiration is enough to ensure the pictures’ “lively

success” among the sedentary public: “Doubtless there is nothing so suggestive as a casbah or some

Cambodian dancers for the walls of your bourgeois dining room.”22

Such comments posit a gulf in taste and understanding between the middle-class public and the

symbolist writers who constituted, for the most part, the corps of avant-garde critics. But symbolist

artists had no automatic antipathy to the Orientalist enterprise. Gustave Moreau had long been in-

terested in the ancient East, in the art and myth of Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as well as In-

dia and Persia. His paintings on Greek mythological themes had an “oriental” insistence on visual

extravagance. In his biblical images, like the celebrated Dance of Salome (Danse de Salomé; UCLA

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), he developed an aesthetic in which a love of syncretic Eastern re-

ligion, profuse ornament, and flashing colors creates a highly personal conception of the East.

Although Moreau was not a traveler, at least two noted Algerian-born symbolists of the 1890s,

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer and Armand Point, did show regularly at the Orientalist Painters. The land-

scapist Point (who had organized the 1889 Algerian pavilion’s exhibition) turned to esoteric sym-

bolist subject matter after settling in France. The Paris-based Lévy-Dhurmer began treating East-

ern scenes with great frequency after 1900, returning regularly to Algeria and Morocco over a

thirty-year period. His chosen medium was pastel, whose pale, crumbling colors uniquely suited the

atmosphere of lyrical introspection he attained in his best works. Most of those were based on visual

notes gathered on his travels, but he composed them back in the studio. Lévy-Dhurmer’s  Evening 

Promenade, Morocco (Promenade du soir; private collection) is an image of womanhood exceptional

among Orientalist paintings in that it both respects the traditional veil of the North African woman

and plays upon that covering up of the visage to develop an aura of mysterious beauty (Fig. 36). As

authors from Renoir to Loti had pointed out, the covering of the body and head only gave more forceto the expression of the eyes. Several of Lévy-Dhurmer’s pastel portraits also succeed in escaping

the stereotype to establish a more intimate rapport with the sitter than had been visible in, for exam-

ple, Renoir’s hastily drawn Algerian figures. Lévy-Dhurmer’s Moroccan ( Le Marocain; Musée Na-

tional des Arts d ’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris) places its subject before what looks like a backdrop of 

the holy city of Moulay-Idriss, outside Fez.23 The artist had used the device of placing writers be-

fore the city they wrote about in such portraits as that of the poet Georges Rodenbach (seen before

the canals of Bruges he evoked in his Bruges-la-morte of 1892). More pertinent is the image of Pierre

Loti (Fig. 37), starry-eyed and distinctly beautified, sporting his best Turkish moustaches, before a

backdrop of the waters of Constantinople at night. (The scene recalls the love boat in his famousnovel Aziyadé.) If the idea of portraits attached to places obtains here too, the beautiful floating face

and robed bust of this Moroccan youth are those of a scholar or artist connected with the religious

zone of Moulay-Idriss housing the tomb of the saint, a mosque, and Koranic schools.

The third prominent symbolist (even postsymbolist) associate of the Orientalist Painters was Emile

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