Emile Claus

Private Collection, Belgium, acquired circa 1880
Thence by descent, and sold: Bernaerts, Antwerp, October 18, 1999, lot 38, illustrated 
Acquired at the above

Possibly, Antwerp, Emile Claus: Solo exhibition of Orientalist works, 1879-80
Possibly, Brussels, Cercle Artistiques, 1880

The following condition report was provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has been well restored and should be hung in its current condition. The canvas has an old lining. The surface is stable. The paint layer is cleaned and varnished. There are some retouched losses in the white cloak of the standing figure and in the black gown around his legs. Under ultraviolet light, restorations can also be seen to the left of his waist and legs and also in the wooden structure to his right. The right leg of the seated figure may have also received some restoration. The remainder of the picture is in excellent condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Though few Orientalist works by Émile Claus are known today, and the conventional literature surrounding this artist suggests that his travels abroad had little impact on the luminist landscapes and rural genre scenes that would later make his name, the present painting suggests an alternative view.  Painted in 1879, the year that Claus embarked on an ambitious itinerary that included Spain, Morocco, and, most memorably, Algeria, The Mosque of Sidi-Boumediene may be considered a prelude to Claus’ near-obsessive fascination with the interplay between photographic realism and the vagaries of light and color.  So too, Claus’ interest in the daily activities and quiet heroism of peasants and figures far removed from the cosmopolitan lifestyle that he cultivated at home – a subject that earned him favorable comparisons with Jules Bastien-Lepage – is evident here and throughout his Orientalist compositions in its earliest, and arguably, its purest, form.¹

Claus’ North African travels took place between December 10, 1878 and May 25, 1879, after a brief period of formal academic training in Antwerp (fig. 1).²  His predecessors along this route included the Belgian painters Jean-François Portaels, who made his way in the 1840s to Egypt, Lebanon, and throughout North Africa, Jean-Baptiste Huysmans, whose 1856-7 travels to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Algeria, Egypt, and Palestine were among the most extensively recorded and well known, and Karel (Charles) Verlat, who journeyed to Egypt, Syria, and Jerusalem between 1874 and 1876.  Among scores of other European, British, and American painters who visited Algeria, it was Frederick Arthur Bridgman who would do the most to popularize the country in the later nineteenth century as a destination for fellow intrepid artist-travellers.  (Though Huysmans would also publish his memoirs and publicize his richly detailed sketchbooks, Bridgman’s Winters in Algeria, first published in 1888 and illustrated with engravings after his own paintings, would become the definitive contemporary travel book for the region, both in America and abroad). 

Bridgman’s highly entertaining documentation of his extended residence in Tlemcen, a city in northwestern Algeria and the site of the Mosque of Sidi-Boumediene, in both print and paint, provides an interesting corollary to Claus’ own experiences in these same locales, as do other artists’ works featuring Sidi-Boumediene.  (Though Bridgman was in North Africa in 1878-9, he did not reach Algeria until the winter of 1879; Claus and Bridgman therefore did not cross paths).³  “This lovely specimen of pure Moorish architecture,” Bridgman penned of the Mosque in 1886, “is in an almost perfect state of preservation, and it so forcibly recalls the Alhambra that one feels almost as though standing with one foot in this celebrated palace and the other in the mosque of Bou-Médine [sic].  A dozen steps lead up to gigantic doors faced with bronze plaques about a sixteenth of an inch in thickness and of geometrical design – a chef-d’oeuvre of the kind,” (Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Winters in Algiers, reprint, London, 1890, p. 135).  Five years earlier, the Italian artist S. Fabrizi had produced several intricately detailed watercolors of the Mosque’s interior, at least one of which features the tiled mihrab (niche indicating the direction of Mecca) and the wooden minbar (pulpit) glimpsed in Claus’ work.  As with Bridgman’s own carefully painted renditions, it is likely that Fabrizi’s paintings were informed by both on-the-spot sketches and contemporary photographs, now readily available from the many makeshift studios set up throughout the region (fig. 2).⁴

Interestingly, Claus’ own musings regarding Tlemcen and its most famous landmarks address the issue of photography directly, and in rather unexpected terms.  Drawn from a series of twenty-seven letters written between the artist and his friend and supporter August Cosyn – the only known archival records of Claus’s North African travels to date - these few sentences suggest the artist’s Orientalist philosophy, and the purpose of his art.⁵ After addressing the “magnificence” of different mosques in that picturesque city, as well as the rituals and practices they inspired, Claus cautioned that the “life” of the Arab in these religious spaces, that is, his way of praying, singing, and “thousands more peculiarities,” could not be captured in a photographic plate, but must be appreciated first-hand (Emile Claus to A.J. Cosyn, Tlemcen, January 14, 1879, Letter VII, published in Dr. Paul Huys, “Emile Claus in boernoes; Reisbrieven uit Noord-Afrika aan August Cosyn, 1879,” p. 109, in Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van Deinze en de Leiestreek, LXV, 1998).  A painting such as The Mosque of Sidi-Boumediene, then, and others in Claus’ oeuvre, carried more than the burden of architectural accuracy or blatant commercial appeal – in the context of Claus’ artistic counsel, they were to be regarded as evidence of a direct encounter, and an attempt to provide those things that the camera could not. 

The wide swathes of white that characterize Claus’ Orientalist pictures, punctuated with the intense jewel-like tones of textiles, tilework, and inlaid stone, were also something with which no contemporary photograph could compete or compare.  In the present painting, these concentrations of color help to set off the monochromatic carvings of Sidi-Boumediene’s stuccowork and distinctive horseshoe arches. The clear, cool light that illuminates this interior space, perhaps the result of the opening of the massive door that Bridgman so memorably describes, forecasts Claus’ later work, in which the relentless study of the effects of pure sunlight would quicken and loosen his brushstrokes in a manner akin to that of the Impressionists, and which the artist would term “luminism.”  (Claus’ commitment to this pursuit was evident in all aspects of his life: the artist’s cottage in Astene, where he stayed from 1883 until his death in 1924 was affectionately called Zonneschijn [“Sunshine”], and one of the many artist groups of which he was a founding member was called the Vie et Lumière, or “Life and Light”).

Claus’ paintings, rich in detail and suffused with “life,” were glossed with one more important function, as well. As historic documents endeavoring to record the costumes, culture, and architecture of a land and peoples in the midst of profound and irreversible change, they become part of a larger project of preservationism, or “salvage ethnography,” prevalent at the time.  (Like so many who looked with concern at colonialism’s impact on Algerian culture, Claus lamented the introduction of modern French goods into traditional Algerian settings: “What the Arab shows you first is unfortunate: the contemporary French lamp! It's like a curse in a temple. In the Mosque, there is the French pendant, which holds the place of honor for the Arab . . .” [Emile Claus to A.J. Cosyn, Letter VII]).  The value of such visual records is particularly resonant today, as historic sites throughout the Arab-speaking world are being destroyed in ways and with a rapidity that no nineteenth-century painter could have imagined.

Upon his return to Belgium in the spring of 1879, Claus exhibited his Orientalist scenes in Antwerp and in Brussels, at various venues including the Cercle Artistique.  Commenting on these pictures, a writer for the Revue Artistique of January 3, 1880 noted that the artist had undertaken his North African journey “in order to complete and perfect his artistic knowledge.”⁶ The effort must be regarded, the critic concluded and as the crowds of people who gathered to see these works seemed to agree, as an unqualified and unremitting success.

 

Dedicated to Abu Madyan Shu’ayb ibn al-Husayn al-Ansari (“Sidi Boumediene”) (circa 1115-1197), founder and head of an independent Sufi circle, the mosque and tomb complex of Sidi-Boumediene, located in Tlemcen, a town in northwestern Algeria, was a favorite pilgrimage site for nineteenth-century artists.  The mosque, built during the Marinid dynasty by Abou el-Hassan in ca. 1328-39, was renowned for its simple horseshoe arches and distinctive tile- and stuccowork, all of which are recorded in exacting detail in Claus’ painting.

 

This catalogue note was written by Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D.

 

1. Claus was friends with the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, as well as the naturalist Émile Zola, and with several members of Belgium’s literati.  For additional examples of Claus’ Orientalist pictures, see, for example, Odalisque couchée, 1879, oil on panel, Private Collection; Portrait of a Young Arab, 1879, oil on canvas, Private Collection; Smoking Arab, 1879, oil on canvas, Private Collection; A Sleeping Arab Musician, 1879, oil on canvas, Private Collection, Abu Dhabi; and the small collection of pencil sketches and landscape paintings also dating to 1879 at the Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek, Belgium.

2.  Claus’ traveling companions to Algeria were his student, the independently wealthy Belgian luminist artist Julies Guiette and the expatriate Italian watercolorist Gustavo Simoni, who spent two years in Tunisia and Algeria in 1877-9, and would continue to visit throughout the 1880s.  (Simoni would also paint Sidi-Boumediene.) 

3.  Claus’ winters in Paris between 1889 and 1892 and exile in London during World War I, during which time he painted his famous “reflections” on the Thames, might have introduced him to Bridgman’s popular works, which were regularly featured in these cities, as well as throughout America; it does not seem, however, that the two artists knew each other socially.

4.  In visiting some of the photographic studios that had arisen in Egypt, Turkey, and throughout North Africa during the course of the nineteenth century, Bridgman and Fabrizi would not have been alone.  In 1875, Jean-Léon Gérôme had purchased photographs from the Abdullah Frères, who operated the most important photography studio in Istanbul, for use toward his own paintings (Bahattin Oztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and artists from 19^th century Istanbul, Istanbul, 2003, vol. I, p. 179), and Ernst's close friend Ludwig Deutsch had used the photographs of G. Lékégian for the backgrounds of his Orientalist pictures as well (Martina Haja and Günther Wimmer, Les orientalistes des écoles allemande et autrichienne, Paris, 2000, p. 199).  Tellingly, on the verso of Lékégian's photographs was often written “Photographie Artistique” and “Atelier Spécial de Peinture,” indicating that the photographs were specifically marketed to artists (Ken Jacobson, Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography 1839-1925, London, 2007, pp. 249-50). 

5.  Although eventually published, these letters were not widely distributed and remain little known to this day.

6.  Additional mention of Claus' Orientalist pictures was made in the Revue Artistique of March 1, 1880 (p. 262-3) and October 4, 1880 (p. 370-1).