Rudolf Ernst

James Harding, Artistes Pompiers: French Academic Art in the 19th Century, London, 1979, p. 85, illustrated.

European enthusiasm for Orientalist subjects was ignited in the early 19th century with colorfully written tales and travelogues such as Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh of 1817, Lord Byron’s The Corsair of 1814 and, most influential for whetting the European appetite, The Arabian Nights, published in 1840 in an updated and more decorous translation by E. W. Lane.  The Scottish artist David Roberts was another inspiring interpreter of the region’s beauty. His series of lithographs, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, made in a six volume set, was based on his eleven month visit to Egypt and the Levant in 1838, and these widely circulated evocative images inspired other artists to also travel or to invent their own exotic views.

Rudolf Ernst was infused with passion for the East, and was one of the artists to travel to Morocco and later Constantinople to see the things he loved to paint.  He settled in Paris in 1876, along with fellow Orientalist Ludwig Deutch (see lot 32) and became a regular exhibitor at the Salon.  From the mid 1880s, he focused exclusively on Orientalist scenes, which brought him great acclaim from American and European collectors alike.  Ernst was fascinated with the culture, architecture and decoration of the Islamic Middle East, and his paintings display the breadth of his knowledge.  This composition shows off Ernst’s fine rendering of a variety of sumptuous surfaces: the simple cloth of a turban, the younger man’s velvet robe, carpets, lustrous ceramic tile, intricately carved wood and stained glass.