Arabian Nights

A commission from Hodder and Stoughton to illustrate The Arabian Nights deepened Edward Detmold’s fascination with an imagined ‘East’ (to which he never travelled). As well as his Nights illustrations, throughout the early to mid-1920s, Detmold produced a series of etchings depicting fantasised images of Arabia and India. His art resonated with the 1920s orientalist visions popularised by tales of T. E. Lawrence’s Arabian adventures and by Hollywood versions of the East (symbolised, for example, by the 1921 film The Sheik ). This chapter examines Detmold’s 1920s art in its broader cultural context: particularly in the context of the power and paradoxes of early twentieth-century orientalism. Detmold’s etchings and paintings from this era drew on imperial notions of eastern ‘others’, but it also reflected his condemnation of the hypocrisies of modern ‘civilisation’, his quest to understand the origins of human violence, and his yearning for spiritual alternatives in which humans could become one with the ground of being.