PAUL VON FRANKEN | The Maiden Tower in Baku

The present lot by the German artist Paul von Franken is a very rare depiction of nineteenth-century Baku – the ‘Paris of the Caucasus’. Franken belonged to the generation of late Romantic painters attracted to the beauty and exotic mystery of the near East and evidently had a taste for myth-making (he had no right to use the aristocratic ‘von’).

His fascination with the region, which underwent dramatic changes in the mid-nineteenth century, is captured in The Maiden Tower in Baku in which the many legends surrounding the centuries-old tower merge with the stories of those living in its shadow. The painter masterfully renders the atmospheric effects and the glow of the fire on the left; he thoroughly studies people’s clothes and local architecture; he beautifully conveys an almost palpable freshness of the coastal night. Yet, his painting remains a fairy tale, a fantasy of an incomprehensible Orient invented by the European artist-traveller.