European & British Art
European & British Art
Property from the Najd Collection
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Femmes fellahs au bain
Lot Closed
December 9, 02:26 PM GMT
Estimate
70,000 - 100,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from the Najd Collection
Jean-Léon Gérôme
French
1824 - 1904
Femmes fellahs au bain
signed J.L.GEROME lower left
oil on canvas
Unframed: 49 by 74cm., 19 by 29in.
Framed: 82.5 by 106cm., 32½ by 41¾in.
We are grateful to Dr Emily M. Weeks for her assistance in cataloguing this work which will be included in her revision of the artist's catalogue raisonné by Gerald M. Ackerman.
Possibly, Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers,
Boussod, Valadon & Cie (acquired from the above 1895)
Thomas Henry Burchell, New York, (purchased from the above in 1910)
C. E. Snedecor (Snedecor and Company), New York (by 1915)
Millard F. Tompkins (sale: American Art Association, New York, 5 March 1915, lot 39; as Moorish Bath)
E. H. Wendell (purchased at the above sale)
Mr and Mrs J. W. R. Crawford, New Rochelle, New York (sale: Sotheby's, New York, 29 May 1980, lot 104 (as Bathers by the Edge of a River)
Mathaf Gallery, London
Purchased from the above
Possibly, Revue libérale, Paris, 1908, p. 5, cited (as Medinet-el-Fayoum)
Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 1986, pp. 288-89, no. 478, catalogued & illustrated (dated 1903, as Vue de Medinet El-Fayoum)
Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 141, cited, p. 152f, catalogued & illustrated
Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Paris, 2000, pp. 356-57, no. 478, catalogued & illustrated (dated 1893, as Vue de Medinet El-Fayoum, Femmes fellahs au bain)
In the soft light of evening, a group of women bathe and fetch water on the banks of the Canal de Joseph (or Bahr Yussef in Arabic) outside Medinet El-Fayoum, the oldest city in Egypt, which is located some eighty miles southwest of Cairo. Gérôme first explored the subject in two earlier paintings of 1870, one of which is now in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the other formerly in the Najd Collection. All three versions are inspired by the artist's visit to the city in 1868.
Paul Lenoir, Gérôme's travelling companion who accompanied him on his 1868 tour of Egypt, vividly described the scene along the canal between Sinuris and Medinet El-Fayoum in his records published in 1872: 'The women seem to have chosen this spot to come and draw their water...From the rising of the sun to its setting, hundreds of women and young girls came down to this spot following each other in procession with the majesty of vestals who go to the sacrifice.'