The Orientalist art movement, although being a predominantly 19th-century phenomenon, started in the time of the Renaissance and continued throughout the years, emerging in the twenty-first century seen through new forms and techniques, spanning the geographical area of the artists’ interest in Middle Eastern and North African Islamic countries. The Orientalism as an art movement can not be associated with any particular European country, nor encapsulated in any of the local “schools”, as throughout the centuries it was exercised by different Western cultures, documenting their experiences of extraordinary meetings with inhabitants of the Other. Orientalism as a historical and cultural event has been uniting various aspects of cultural life for a number of centuries – literature, fine arts, architecture, music, philosophy – and generating an exotic image within our consciousness, one that had a right to its own existence.

The variety of the representations of the world of the Others is fully reflected in the collection of the Orientalist Museum, which is one of the most significant collections ever assembled in the world. The approximate 900 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints, as well as sculpture and applied art, trace the Orientalism back to the early sixteenth century.