John Frederick Lewis

Before separation from the lower section of the painting:
William Leaf, of Park Hill, Streatham (by 1867, and sold, his sale, Christie's, May 7, 1875, lot 510)
William Vokins (acquired at the above sale)
Louis Huth (by 1878)
Sale: Christie's, April 29, 1893, lot 105
Agnew's (acquired at the above sale)
Holbrook Gaskell, of Woolton Wood, Liverpool (and sold, his sale, Christie's, June 24, 1909, lot 61)
King (acquired at the above sale)
Sir Thomas Devitt, Bart, of Buckingham Gate, London (and sold, his sale, Christie's, May 16, 1924, lot 118) 
Gooden & Fox (acquired at the above sale)
1^st Viscount Leverhulme (and sold, his sale, Anderson Galleries, New York, February 18, 1926, lot 171, illustrated)
Arthur U. Newton (acquired at the above sale as confirmed by result list published in The New York Times, February 19, 1926)
Brooklyn Paramount Theater, New York, circa 1928

Separated from the lower part:
Possibly, Brooklyn Paramount Theater, circa 1928, or before 1964
Possibly sold at Birnbaum Galleries, New York, mid November 1964
Private Collection, Connecticut
Acquired from the above by the present owner

As part of the complete painting:
London, Royal Academy, 1864, no. 110
Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1867, no. 959 (lent by W. Leaf, Esq)
Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1878. no. 144 (lent by L. Huth)
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by British Artists Deceased since 1850, 1901, no. 33 (lent by Holbrook Gaskell)
Glasgow, International Exhibition, 1901, no.13 (lent by Holbrook Gaskell)

The Times, April 30, 1864, p.14
Athenaeum, May 7, 1864, p. 651
Art Journal, 1864, p.157, 166 
"Picture Sales of the Season," Art Journal, November 1875, p. 343
Alfred George Temple, The Art of Painting in the Queen’s Reign, London,1897, p.144

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is painted on what appears to be a piece of mahogany, which has received what appears to be a mahogany cradle. It is almost as if the two were applied at the same time. The cradle is active, the panel is flat and the paint layer is stable. The paint layer is also clean, varnished and retouched. The upper right and upper left are unpainted to accommodate a small spandrel in the frame. There is no abrasion to the paint layer and no weakness or instability to the painting at present. The panel is made from two pieces of wood joined horizontally across the lower center. The panel is joined and stable, although it has moved slightly in the past and has received a little retouching. There is a horizontal line of very small isolated losses in the lower left corner and across the bottom edge about one third of the way through the picture, which have been consolidated, filled and retouched. Throughout the remainder of the picture, there are no retouches and the condition is extremely good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

John Frederick Lewis’s Courtyard (Hosh) of the House of the Coptic Patriarch, Cairo was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, nearly a century and a half ago.  It was placed in a prominent position and received widespread commentary from the critics, of whom the most enthusiastic was F.G. Stephens in The Athenaeum (1864, no.1906, May 7 1864, p.651):  "one of the most brilliant of his pictures.  In the midst of a court, and overshadowing a pool, that is thronged with water-birds, stands a leafy acacia-tree, through the branches of which a thousand specks of sunlight glance; doves perch on the boughs, hover in the air, or swoop to the ground; a gigantic camel, followed by her foal, stalks into the space.  In the front is a slave, seated by a heap of fruit; the Patriarch dictates a letter to his secretary.  The whole scene is full of life, colour and light. The sculptured wall at the back of this picture shows one of the happiest pieces of Mr Lewis’s painting; its colour is delicious and its treatment of shadow, broken by reflected light, admirable’."

Since then the painting, an oil on panel measuring approximately 43 ½ x 42 inches (slight variations of size in the catalogues listed above), has been subject to unusual vagaries of fortune. During the 19^th century it passed through the hands of several wealthy industrialists with well-established collections of British art, the first of whom was William Leaf, silk-merchant, philanthropist and promoter of homeopathy in Britain, and the last being Lord Leverhulme, founder of the Unilever empire.  It was not included among the paintings given by him to the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, but instead sold in one of the numerous sales from his collections after his death. The strangest episode in the painting’s history was its acquisition by one of New York’s lavishly decorated theatres, the Brooklyn Paramount, in the late 1920s and its subsequent severance into two parts.  Exactly when or why this occurred is not known, but possibly it was to fit into the ornate ‘Alhambresque’ interior of the theatre, referred to in The New York Times’s account of the sale of its contents in 1964 as the ‘Palace of Splendour’ (November 22, 1964). Sometime during this period, the lower part of the painting was removed from its panel support and transferred to canvas.  This lower section appeared on theLondon art market in 1976 (lot 307 in addendum to Sotheby’sLondon sale catalogue, November 24, 1976, noting the transfer) and then again in 1996 (Sotheby’s London, November 20, 1996, lot 253) since when it has been in a private collection.  The long lost upper section has now emerged from obscurity, a remarkable survival of the original panel. Though a fragment, the artist’s intentions are revealed in the smooth surface of the oil paint on a prepared white ground, which displays to singular effect his characteristically virtuoso painting technique.

The subject is the leafy upper branches of a large tree, on which perch an assortment of doves, their differently colored plumage meticulously rendered.  Through the branches can be seen the complex wooden lattice-work of two large mashrabiya windows of an old Cairene house. The bright sunlight filtering through and sparkling over the surfaces is rendered with the brilliance for which Lewis is so justly celebrated. As a result, an extraordinary dialogue between architectural and natural forms has been created. So intensely has the image been rendered, that this fragment can now stand as a work of art in its own right.


Few studies made specifically in preparation for Lewis’s finished paintings survive, but a watercolour sketch of the spreading upper branches of a tree, similarly shaped, appears to relate to this part of his image (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, one of a group of studies given by the executors of Mrs J.F.Lewis, D.1154-D.1198-1908).  The tree is most likely a Robinia pseudoacacia (False Acacia or Black Locust tree), by the nineteenth century common in England as well as Egypt, and it might well have been drawn by Lewis while working on the composition.  Three other works by Lewis are related to the 1864 exhibited panel. One is an unfinished watercolor, on five joined sheets of paper (975 x 1260 mm), depicting the same courtyard, but lacking the pool of water and the abundance of animals and birds in the foreground (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1948P44 ). Less elaborate than the final work, this may have been begun while Lewis was living in Cairo: significantly, the branches of the tree are less gnarled than in both the watercolour sketch and the exhibited painting, suggesting an early phase in the development of the composition. That it represents the Ottoman-period house in which Lewis was living while in Cairo between 1841 and 1851, is indicated by a drawing of this same location, with its identically detailed gallery or tahtabush and elaborate mashrabiya windows, inscribed Courtyard of the Painter’s House, Cairo (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 287-1898; http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O136735/courtyard-of-the-painters-house-drawing-lewis-john-frederick/ ).

It is also the same space so colourfully described, tongue-in-cheek, by Lewis’s friend, the writer, William Makepeace Thackeray: 

"First we came to a broad open court, with a covered gallery running along one side of it.  A camel was reclining on the grass there; near him there was a gazelle to glad J. with his dark blue eye…. On the opposite side to the covered gallery rose up the walls of his long, queer, many-windowed, many-galleried house.  There were wooden lattices to those arched windows, through the diamonds of which I saw two of the most beautiful, enormous, ogling, black eyes in the world, looking down upon the interesting strangers.  Pigeons were flapping, and hopping, and fluttering, and cooing about.  Happy pigeons, you are, no doubt, fed with the henna-tipped fingers of Zuleikah" (Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, London, 1846, reprint, Heathfield, Sussex, 1991, pp.143-4).  How much of this Thackeray actually witnessed and how much he exaggerated, generating a textual image that was later reconstructed visually by Lewis himself in his retrospective painting of his Cairene establishment, is the subject of continuing analysis (see: Emily M. Weeks, ‘Chapter 3: A Body of Texts’, in Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and the Art of Orientalist Painting; New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, forthcoming).

At a date unknown, Lewis painted a very similar but smaller version of his exhibited painting, also on panel (368 x 356 mm; London, Tate; http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewis-study-for-the-courtyard-of-the-coptic-patriarchs-house-in-cairo-n01688).  Although usually assumed to be a study, this is highly worked and more likely to be a finished composition for a client, made speculatively or on commission.  More commonly, Lewis’s alternative versions of his exhibited compositions are in watercolor, but being in oil, this example allows current viewers to imagine, on a smaller scale, the full impact made by the larger painting on the walls of the Academy. The Times expressed its effect: "the picture is somewhat bewildering by its multiplicity – 20 pictures, let us say, in one.  Of the wondrousness of the painting of detail there is no need to speak" (April 30, 1864, p.14). Once again, Lewis had assaulted the senses of his admiring public, proving himself the undisputed master of the visual display of the Orient. The following year, he was elected a Royal Academician, taking his place in the artistic establishment as "the eminent Oriental painter" (Illustrated London News, Supplement, March 25, 1865, p.285).

Finally too, he was regarded as the equal of his old friend and rival, Edwin Landseer: his painting was hung in the East Room of the Royal Academy, in one of the "three posts of honour," according to the Art Journal (June 1, 1865, p.157), along with one of Landseer’s most ambitious late paintings, Man proposes, God disposes (Egham, Surrey, Royal Holloway College) and John Phillips’s La Gloria: a Spanish Wake (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), regarded as the artist’s masterpiece. In the same room were hung, among other works, John Everett Millais’s My Second Sermon and Frederic Leighton’s Dante in Exile.

We would like to thank Briony Llewellyn for writing this catalogue entry.

Please note this lot is sold unframed