An atmosphere of conspiracy pervades American artist James Smillie’s A Lady of Cairo Visiting (1881). Faces obscured in shadows, conversations held in alcoves, merchants crouched along the road all add intrigue to the scene unfolding around the equally enigmatic “Lady of Cairo.”

The immense detail in Smillie’s etching gives a paradoxical impression. On the one hand, the details of the fabrics, architecture, and everyday life offer viewers a scrupulous portrait of the so-called Orient. On the other hand, these details refuse to convey key information that would dispel the mystery of the scene: Who is the Lady of Cairo? What are the two figures discussing? What is about to happen?

This contradictory entwining of knowledge and exoticism has characterized the West’s treatment of the Orient in the 19th-century art, politics, and popular culture. The Orient enticed Westerners as an object of study—a distant land where people had an entirely different way of life from American and European bourgeois society—and became a staple of nineteenth-century art and literature. American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman, a prolific practitioner of this form of art, known as Orientalism, painted intricate scenes of North Africa, which he observed during his regular travels there during the 1870s and 1880s.