The Heroic Bust

The Orientalist is an obsolete idea. Picture a dilettante collecting bits of the mysterious East and putting them around his house, under glass and on shelves, bound in books. It's easier to contemplate people when you convert them into objects first. Which, I guess, is the process I used here. I've never thought of myself as a realist illustrator. It's been useful to come up with devices for getting around life drawing, drawing from life. One of my favorites is to imagine the person or persons in a scenario as toys or bits of Staffordshire pottery. This justifies the stiffness of the pose and the unreality of the situation I've put them into, and lets me get on with the metaphor or the meaning. Is this any different than Hitchcock treating actors as cattle? I can't remember whose portrait I drew this from, but it may have been Horace Walpole. The turban makes me think of Oliver Goldsmith.