The recent surge in publications dealing with European art on Islamic themes, especially the work of Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century, is a part of a general reappraisal of nineteenth century academic art occurring in our time, dually reflected in scholarly research and in the art market, and often showing the effect of the latter on the former. This dual interest has resulted in turn in a significant number of sumptuous new publications, often with many color illustrations. These books and catalogues have sought to appeal variously to the marketplace, to serious scholarship and to range a range of other interests from the hotly political to the mildly prurient.

One result has been the appearance of new studies on important figures in the history of art, such as the French academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome, who had previously been ignored as a result of then-prevailing dogmas of taste. Another has been the appearance in print, and thus in the ambit of scholarly scrutiny, of the works of numerous artists whose production is either less well known, but of considerable historical interest (such as the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi), or whose work tends to be individually inconsequential – both aesthetically and contextually – but which as a body casts considerable light on European attitudes toward and knowledge of the Islamic world both before and during the colonial era.

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