FRANZ KOSLER | THE ENTERTAINERS

Mathaf Gallery, London (by 1980)

Purchased from the above

London, Mathaf Gallery, A Retrospective of Middle Eastern Painting, 1980, illustrated in the catalogue

London, Mathaf Gallery, Summer Exhibition, Important Orientalist Paintings of the 19th Century, 1983, illustrated in the catalogue

Lynne Thornton, Les Orientalistes: peintres voyageurs, 1828-1908, Paris, 1983, p. 242-43, catalogued & illustrated

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, pp. 182-83, catalogued & illustrated

Martina Haja & Günther Wimmer, Les Orientalistes des écoles allemandes et autrichiennes, Courbevoie, 2000, p. 281, catalogued & illustrated

Lynn Thornton, Les Orientalistes, peintres voyageurs, 1828-1908, Paris, 2001, p. 269, catalogued & illustrated

Set near one of Cairo's two Mamluk cemeteries on the outskirts of the old town, where travellers and other communities lived close to the tombs in a semi-permanent town of shacks and tents, this lively tableau of street performers and their audience provided Kosler with an opportunity to capture all manner of ethnic and racial types, including Nubians, Abyssians, and Egyptians. The panoply of observers enthusiastically beholds the spectacle before them.  

Kosler was taught at the Vienna Academy by Leopold Carl Müller, the most celebrated Austrian Orientalist painter of his generation. Inspired by Müller, Kosler first set foot in Egypt in 1892. Sponsored by Archduke Ferdinand Karl, he returned to Egypt two years later and held his first one-man show there. Among his Egyptian patrons was Said Halim Pasha, grandson of Mohammed Ali and future Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.