Arthur von Ferraris

Arthur von Ferraris studied in Paris with the renowned academic painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jules Lefebvre. It may have been Gérôme who encouraged Ferraris to travel to Cairo with his friend and fellow Austrian artist, Ludwig Deutsch between the late 1870s and late 1880s. Ferraris’s polished and realist style and choice of subject, would have undoubtedly been influenced by Gérôme but also by his companion Deutsch. Like Deutsch, Ferraris’s oeuvre provides a visual document of the vibrancy of life in the streets of Cairo. The present work for instance, captures a musician playing an improvised rababa and Caroline Juler has suggested that the sound chamber was perhaps once an ordinary box.

Ferraris’s works were exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français, at the Expositions Universelle in Paris, and internationally, in Budapest, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich.