Private travel from Britain to the Middle East was rare before the 1830s, but travel for warfare, diplomacy, trade and religion had been going on for centuries. While outside Europe, these early travellers and residents assumed 'Oriental costume' for different reasons. Many believed themselves to be safer when dressed similarly to local people, while more academic visitors often wished to appear incognito in order to facilitate their researches; others did so out of a love of 'fancy dress', while still others wished to signal a committed solidarity with the culture whose clothes they put on. As demonstrated by the portraits in this room, some chose to record themselves in the dress they adopted or purchased abroad and subsequently brought back to Britain.
From the mid-nineteenth century, relatively few Western travellers adopted Eastern dress, not least because Ottoman- Egyptian culture was by this time adapting Western styles in architecture, design and costume. Such developments formed part of an official programme of 'modernisation', largely in response to growing European influence. Even so, British artists such as John Frederick Lewis, William Holman Hunt and David Roberts chose to portray themselves in Eastern dress, perhaps to imply their authority as Orientalist painters to a Western audience.
