Property from the Collection of the late Cyril and Shirley Fry

Unknown photographer, 1860s

John Frederick Lewis in Ottoman Dress

Lot Closed

July 8, 02:10 PM GMT

Estimate

1,500 - 2,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property from the Collection of the late Cyril and Shirley Fry

Unknown photographer, 1860s

John Frederick Lewis in Ottoman Dress


Albumen print, together with approximately forty further photographs of artists including: David Cox, John Varley, Edward Duncan, Thomas Taylor, William Callow, John Callow, James Dickinson, Thomas Rowbotham, Edward Richardson, Charles Bentley, James Duffield Harding, William Henry Hunt, William Powell Frith, John Linnell, Sir Edwin Landseer, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Thomas Faad, Carl Haag, Robert Browning; and three sheets, containing the signatures of J.M.W. Turner, William Collins, William Turner, and others; mostly bound, possibly by Cyril and Shirley Fry, in a leather album

The photograph of J.F. Lewis:142 by 110 mm; The album: 295 by 214 m

B. Llewellyn, ‘A “Masquerade” Unmasked: An Aspect of John Frederick Lewis’s Encounter with Egypt’, in Egyptian Encounters, Jason Thompson ed., vol. 23, no. 3 of Cairo Papers in Social Science, Fall 2000, pp. 139-40, illus. p.144, fig. 2;
B. Llewellyn, ‘“Solitary Eagle”? The public and Private Personas of John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876)’ in Zeynep Inankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts eds., The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, Istanbul: Suna and Inan Kiraç Foundation, Pera Museum, 2011, pp. 170, 177 n. 23, 25;
B. Llewellyn, The Art of John Frederick Lewis from The Shafik Gabr Collection, privately printed, 2018, p. 13, illus. p.10;
B. Llewellyn, ‘John Frederick Lewis, “A Memlook Bey” Disguise or Disclosure?’, in William Greenwood and Lucien de Guise, eds, Inspired by the East how the Islamic world influenced Western art, London: The British Museum Press, 2019, p. 60, illus. p. 62, fig. 6;
B. Llewellyn, John Frederick Lewis Facing Fame, Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery-Artists’ Village, 2019, pp. 8, 31, 33, 54, 48 fn. 74, illus. p. 10, fig. 3, and on back cover;
J. Maas, The Victorian Art World in Photographs, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1984, illus. p.147;
J. Parry, Orientalist Lives Western Artists in the Middle East 1830-1920, Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2018, pp. 197, 199;
C. Riding, ‘Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait’, in Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, London: Tate Publishing, 2008, p. 56;
M. Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 38-39, illus. pl. 4;
E. M. Weeks, ‘Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalist Painting’, in Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, London: Tate Publishing, 2008, p. 22, illus. p.23, fig. 12;
E. M. Weeks, Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalism, Yale: New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 1, 23-28, 32, 36, 59, 105, 164 n. 79, 165 n. 82, 167 n. 99, illus. p. 5, fig. 5 and f. p. 1;
C. Williams, ‘John Frederick Lewis: “Reflections of Reality”’, in Muqarnas An Annual of the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, vol. 18, 2001, pp. 234, illus. p. 236, fig. 11

 

Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery-Artists’ Village, John Frederick Lewis Facing Fame, booklet by Briony Llewellyn, 2019, p. 54, illus. p. 10, fig. 3, and on back cover
In this albumen print by an unknown photographer Lewis is wearing garments acquired during his time in Egypt in the 1840s. He plays the role of an ‘Oriental’ pasha, a wealthy Ottoman dignitary, although by the 1860s his clothes – voluminous trousers (şalvar), short embroidered saltah jacket, and turban - would have been anachronistic, since dress reforms had brought in the more westernised form of clothing that was then more generally worn. It is probably the same costume in which ‘dressed as a Turk’ Lewis is reported to have attended a fancy-dress ball (W.S. Spanton, recalling events of 1866-67).

This is the sole known print of this photograph, although another, probably taken at the same time and also known only from one print, shows Lewis wearing the same garb (Royal Watercolour Society, Bankside, London). In that one he adopts the reclining ‘odalisque’ pose that was a feature of portrayals of Western travellers in the Near East. It seems likely that, in contrast to the more conventional and widely-circulated depiction of Lewis wearing typical Victorian dress, seen in a carte-de-visite photograph by John Watkins, these two images of him in his ‘Oriental’ guise, were known only to a small circle of Lewis’s friends.

The costume is the very one that William Makepeace Thackeray describes his friend wearing in his characteristically witty but slyly tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the elusive ‘J.—‘, whom he visited in Cairo in 1844: ‘He has adapted himself outwardly … to the oriental life…. He wears a very handsome grave costume of dark blue, consisting of an embroidered jacket and gaiters, and a pair of trousers, which would make a set of dresses for an English family’ (Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 1846).

Lewis wears the same costume in one of his best-known paintings, In the Bezestein: El Khan Khalil, Cairo, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861 (oil on panel, sold at Sotheby’s 20 November 1996, lot 251; a version in watercolour is in Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery). Here he portrays himself full-face, confronting the viewer, situated in Cairo’s well-known bazaar. Behind him is a white textile reminiscent of a photographer’s backcloth, suggesting the existence of a now unknown third photograph of Lewis in this seated pose.

We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for cataloguing this lot.

 

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