- 22
John Frederick Lewis
Description
- John Frederick Lewis
- The Arab Caravan Encampment at Edfou
- watercolor and gouache over traces of graphite with white heightening on paper
- 7 1/8 by 17 3/4 in.
- 18 by 45 cm
Provenance
Nosida (acquired at the above sale)
R. Mackenzie, 1888
John Graham
Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London
W. G. Driver
Sale: Christie's, London, October 16, 1981, lot 93, illustrated
Peter Nahum, Ltd., London
Private Collector (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 1, 2001, lot 25, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Literature
Emily M. Weeks, "'For Love or Money,' Collecting the Orientalist Pictures of John Frederick Lewis," Fine Arts Connoisseur, p. 47, illustrated pp. 46-7, fig 8.
Condition
"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."
Catalogue Note
Lewis began his career as a watercolorist, and only turned his considerable talents towards oil painting in the 1850s for financial reasons. Such was his affection for and skill with the watercolor medium that he continued to produce many of his large oil paintings in small-scale watercolors as well. The present lot relates to a painting of the same subject, produced in 1860, presently in the Tate Gallery, London. In both works, Lewis combines topographical precision, capturing Egypt's Ptolemaic temple of Edfou along the Nile, with astute observations of contemporary Egyptian life. In the nineteenth century, Edfou was considered one of Egypt's most beautiful sites, and its Temple of Horus Behedti, with its with particularly well-preserved inscriptions, was likely visited by Lewis during his ten year stay in Cairo. Such first person experience of Egypt has long been attributed to the fine detail of Lewis' compositions. The Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray famously described visiting his artist friend in his grand old Ottoman house. There Thackeray found not the London man-about-town he had once known, but a "languid Lotus-eater" who led the "dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life' of a privileged bey [gentleman]." Although comfortable in this luxurious new setting, Lewis admitted that it had become tiresome: he much preferred to be in the desert, "under the tents, with still more nothing to do than in Cairo; now smoking, now cantering on Arabs, and no crowd to jostle you; solemn contemplations of the stars at night, as the camels were picketed, and the fires and pipes were lighted" (William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 1846, pp. 282-91). Such dreams for the desert are echoed in the present work and its view of a Bedouin caravan encampment.
Unlike many artists who traveled in the Middle East and sought to impress their audiences with a panoramic view of all they surveyed, Lewis chose to focus on a small range of subjects, and investigated them with a remarkable intensity of vision. Between 1853 and 1860, the artist painted and exhibited no less than ten desert scenes, whose similarities with the present work are difficult to miss. Yet the subject is a somewhat unusual one for Lewis, who painted few topographical views while in Egypt (Stevens, p. 204). It has been suggested that by placing a typical Oriental genre scene within a historically accurate setting, Lewis was heeding the advice of John Ruskin who, in a review of Lewis's 1859 work Waiting for the Ferry, encouraged him to turn his eye towards the "Sphinx, and the temples, and the hieroglyphics, and the mirage and the simoun, and everything we want to know about" (Academy Notes, as quoted in E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 1903-12, vol. XIV, pp. 218-9; Stevens p. 204). However, while Lewis includes Edfou's ancient architecture, ultimately it is secondary to the detailing of the Bedouin encampment of the foreground. The artist pays equal attention to his human and animal figures. A rider rests on the sand, his pose and costume replicating the forms and coloration of the camels who dominate the picture space. These animals were the constant companions of the Bedouin, providing them with everything from transport and commerce. In his youth, Lewis had made his name as an animal painter, and his expertise in the genre is well demonstrated here: from the tufts of soft hair underneath the camels' chins to their impossibly long eyelashes, to the wrinkles of skin around their lips and along their undulating necks, Lewis misses no detail of their peculiar anatomy. The visual complexity evidences Lewis' painstaking painting style: often using sable brushes and fine papers purchased from the well-established firm of Charles Roberson & Company, and typically incorporating bodycolor (watercolor mixed with white paint) into his works, Lewis was able to achieve extraordinary jewel-like tones and intricate detail revealing every nuance of the scene. And by placing the traveling group against the temple pylons, Lewis successfully grappled with the contradictions of depicting ancient ruins and modern life, balancing the fantasy aesthetic of the Orient with his everyday observations in Cairo.