CHARLES WILDA | THE CARPET MERCHANTS

Mathaf Gallery, London (by 1983)

Purchased from the above 

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 233, cited, p. 236, catalogued & illustrated

Martina Haja & Günther Wimmer, Les Orientalistes des écoles allemandes et autrichiennes, Courbevoie, 2000, pp. 356-57, catalogued & illustrated

Set in Cairo, a group of carpet merchants are absorbed in their trade. A local man, admiring a carpet, smokes a hookah as he listens to the salesman peddle bargains in the background. The backdrop may be based on the Khan Khalili Souk, a bazaar in the historic centre of Cairo that opened up to tourists in the nineteenth century. Wilda grouped his figures so that the viewer's eye is drawn with equal interest from one to the other, all hard at work in their profession. 

Born in Vienna in 1854, Wilda trained at the Vienna Academy under Leopold Carl Müller. Like many of his fellow Orientalist painters, he travelled to Egypt in the early 1880s and set up a studio in Cairo where he developed a keen interest in depicting everyday Egyptian life. Wilda exhibited widely in Vienna and Berlin, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. In the year of his death, the Künstlerhaus in Vienna honoured him with his first retrospective.