Oriental Rider 1822 - 1885

Rodolphe Bresdin made this pen and brown ink drawing called "Oriental Rider" sometime in the 19th century. It depicts a figure on horseback, a subject that allowed artists to play with European fantasies about the exotic 'Orient.' Bresdin was a master of etching and lithography. He was admired by artists like Redon, but he struggled to find institutional support. His style, reminiscent of earlier masters like Dürer, made him an outsider in the rising avant-garde art world. Bresdin’s decision to represent an ‘oriental’ subject is telling. The ‘Orient’ was not a real place, so much as a European idea. It's impossible to say whether Bresdin was intentionally critiquing the way his culture imagined other places, or whether he was simply participating in the artistic norms of his time. Art history helps us understand the social conditions that shaped artistic production, and the ways art can reflect or critique those conditions. To dig deeper, we might look at the exhibition records of 19th century Paris, or at period writings on race and empire.