The critique of orientalism begun with Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has been applied to mostly literary and historical texts, and only rarely to visual materials. This is surprising given the plethora of orientalist themes and motifs in the realm of visual culture. "Art of Colonialism , Colonialism of Art" analyzes the engravings of the Description de l' Égypte as an archetypical case of visual orientalism.

    The World Wide Web provides an alternative method to traditional art historical publishing. The aim of "Art of Colonialism, Colonialism of Art" is to combine text and images in an article which is driven as much by images as by text. This revised and greatly expanded version of an article, originally published in L'Ésprit Créateur, vol. 34 (1994), 69-91, now includes nearly 100 images.

    Many images appear in the main body of the article. Others are hyperlinked in the text -- click on the highlighted text to view these images. After viewing the hyperlinked images, click on "Back to Article" to return to where you were in the article. In addition, all endnotes, some of which include images, are also hyperlinked -- click on the endnote number highlighted in the text. After viewing, click on "Go" at the top of your screen, then "Back" to return to where you were in the article. At the bottom of each page of the article a toolbar is located with several hyperlink options. "Back" takes you to the preceeding page. "About this Project" takes you to the Iconothèque homepage. "Table of Contents" takes you to the abbreviated table of contents for the article (see below). "Forward" takes you to the next page of the article.

    The following table of contents provides an overview of topics and subjects discussed in the article. Each page in the table is hyperlinked to the repective Web page of the article so you can go directly to it.

    Thanks to Vernon Burton, Roxana Hadad, David Herr, Bob Jones, Todd Larson and especially Robert McLain for their help, and to the Advanced Information Technologies Group, Educational Technologies Board, Faculty Research Board, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications all at the University of Illinois for support. This material is copyright 1997 by David Prochaska. All rights reserved. For reproduction permission contact David Prochaska. We welcome feedback and comments to the author at dprochas@uiuc.edu.