Michelet Georges-Claude 

France, 1873-Beirut, 1946

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At the end of his life, Georges-Claude Michelet looked back with astonishment on the path he had travelled: that of a French amateur painter of the Orient who had visited the Ottoman Empire before falling in love with Brousse and moving there. After his stay in Turkey, he established himself in Beirut in a studio on rue du Patriarche Hoyeck, and continued to paint landscapes and scènes de genre, and to teach a few students, including Galentz in the early 1930s and Terpinian in the 1940s.

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Michelet had in mind the idea of painting an Orient that he saw less as a motif than as a way of capturing the forms, colors, an a way of living that represented the corollary of his manner of painting. But time passed and this experience became less and less romantic; the France that he had left returned to him, and the streets of Oriental cities had transformed beyond his recognition. 

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His work neither represents the initiation nor the achievement of an Orientalist painting but, in a symbolic fashion, the passage of the Ottoman Empire to the French Mandate in the region. Something of an Ottoman himself, he was in his element with Brousse, spa towns and Europeans orders. In a way, like an echo, he continued the work of Liotard – except that Liotard had finished his career as a portrait painter to the European courts – and Amedeo Preziosi.