Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy

Painstakingly researched from many sources, this is the first book to look at the artistic phenomenon known as turquerie. At the end of the 17th century, the long-standing fear of the Turk in Europe was gradually replaced by fascination. Travellers’ accounts of the Ottoman lands, translations of works such as One Thousand and One Nights, and the magnificent spectacle of Ottoman ambassadors and their retinues were among the catalysts that inspired the creation of a European fantasy of this world. In this new book, Haydn Williams shows how turquerie manifested itself in the arts across Europe. Its most intense and long-lasting expression was in France, but its reach was broad: from a mosque folly in Kew Gardens to an ivory statuette of a janissary created in Dresden for King Augustus II of Poland and the costumes worn for a carnival celebration in Rome in 1748. Focusing on categories including painting, architecture, interiors and the theatre, Turquerie provides an engaging account of this whimsical European fantasy.