NEW HAVEN — Technically, the paintings are oils and watercolors — but what’s really on display at “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830–1925,” which runs through April 27 at the Yale Center for British Art, are beautiful postcards from an age of innocence. The early forays of European artists into the Middle East produced tantalizing images — master painters such as David Wilkie and Eugène Delacroix went there, after all — meant to delight viewers more than challenge them. In fact, these picturesque renderings of Turkey, the Levant, and North Africa (non-coastal regions were generally too far afield) are notable for their utter lack of narrative. Tension seems to melt away in scenes of antique ruins or reclining odalisques; drama is swallowed up in jewel-box tableaus rich in fine arabesques. Understandably, industrial-era Europeans liked the idea of an exotic foreign land resistant to change. As Rana Kabbani writes in the show’s catalog, the Middle East depicted here is a “static world of exquisite surface.”

Since then, of course, things have gotten a bit more complicated. The influence of postcolonial theory, with its emphasis on historical Western subjugation of other cultures, and the current geopolitical situation have made so-called Orientalist painting one of art history’s most loaded subject areas — “right up there with slavery,” according to the co-curator of the exhibition, Christine Riding of Tate Britain. In fact, Ms. Riding noted that widespread “cultural diplomacy” efforts in British museums made it impossible for her and fellow curator Nicholas Tromans to secure several loans. Still, the nearly 90 paintings on display here comprise an impressive survey.

Some of the works — including Frank Dicksee’s rather suggestive “Leila” (1892) — are on loan from private collectors in the Middle East, which might sound bizarre given the Islamic taboo on representative art. The prohibition, however — admittedly, an uneven one — has given European paintings a key role in the pictorial history of the Middle East.

That history is fraught, but that does not necessarily make it counterfeit. And British Orientalist painters — which “Lure of the East” is the first major show to focus on — were more interested in documenting the region than their French counterparts.

For one thing, they actually set foot in it. Had Ingres bothered to visit Turkey, his 1862 painting “The Turkish Bath” might be something other than an orgy of writhing nudes. Then again, maybe not. The exhibition helps this juxtaposition of national sensibilities emerge with strategic placements of two works by Jean-Léon Gérôme. His sultry lineup of bare-breasted female slaves (“For Sale: Slaves at Cairo”) hangs next to William Allan’s less overtly erotic depiction, “The Slave Market, Constantinople,” while his portrait of a triumphant Napoleon in front of the pyramids in full martial gear is hung next to Thomas Phillips’s well-known rendering of Lord Byron in Albanian costume. The point is not that Byron’s ego was smaller, or that he had no taste for conquest. It’s that he, like many of the British portrait subjects on display here — some of them painters in self-portraits — was at least willing enough to engage with a foreign culture to play dress up, and realized that the British public would take him more seriously if he credibly presented himself as someone who knew the region. (As it turned out, the portrait did wonders for his book sales.)

No one found the Near East as alluring as the painter John Frederick Lewis, who moved to Cairo in the mid-19th century and became one of Britain’s foremost experts on modern Egyptian life. After paying Lewis a brief visit, William Thackeray teasingly described his friend in a published 1846 account as a “languid Lotus-eater,” pasha-like in voluminous trousers that “would make a set of dresses for an English family.” Unlike William Holman Hunt and other painters who only donned Oriental costume for portraits, Lewis had a genuine interest in local mores, which served him well in respectful domestic scenes such as “Reception” (1873) and “Hhareem,” which shot him to the top of the Victorian art world when it was first exhibited in 1850.

It’s easy to see why — both paintings represent Orientalism at its dazzling best. Commingling with an earnest desire to document is a potent but harmless sense of fantasy; more than his competitors, Lewis packed his canvases with intricate details, from heaps of embroidery to floors of individually painted mosaic tiles. Precious? A bit. But the dense ornamentation is rigorously organized within the frame, and ultimately less overwhelming than might be expected. It’s richly indulgent, but harmonious.

The mood in these scenes is luxurious and relaxed; nothing much is going on in either one. As in “The Seraff — A Doubtful Coin,” another fine Lewis painting, which depicts two veiled women beseeching a Cairo moneylender, a drama of glances is being played out. More than other representative genres, however, Orientalist painting is about the gazes outside the frame. In depicting Middle Eastern life, Lewis and his ilk were satisfying the British public’s curiosity for the unknown — in particular the forbidden spaces of the mosque and the harem. They were breaking down symbolic barriers, a task that was either aggressive or innocent — probably both — but rarely easy for the empirically-minded British. The Islamic world’s segregation of men and women consistently frustrated Wilkie in his search for genre subjects, and Frederic Leighton complained that Algerians would “slink away when they perceive you are trying to sketch them.”

It would be silly to claim that Eurocentric prejudice in these paintings never enters the picture. “Lure of the East,” which will be shown at Tate Britain before traveling to Istanbul and Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, would probably not exist if it didn’t. But the beguiling images of Lewis and others — as well as the objects and documents in “Pearls to Pyramids,” an accompanying exhibition that outlines the influence of trade and tourism on Britain’s relations with the Middle East — help show that there was more to the encounter than that.

Until April 27 (1080 Chapel St.‚ New Haven ,Conn., 203-432-2800).