Property from the Collection of the late Cyril and Shirley Fry
John Frederick Lewis in Ottoman Dress
Lot Closed
July 8, 02:10 PM GMT
Estimate
1,500 - 2,000 GBP
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
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.