Gustave Boulanger

Many Orientalist artists were preoccupied with the subject of Muslim Prayer, not least Gustave Boulanger’s comrade and fellow student Jean-Léon Gérôme but also Ludwig Deutsch and Frederick Arthur Bridgman. Gérôme’s notable depiction of indoor worship painted also in 1871, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled Public Prayer in the Mosque of Amr. In the present work Boulanger has portrayed the central standing figure performing the initial invocation to God, or takhbir. He is joined by two figures - one bows to the ground in Sujud while the other prays the Tashahhud. Other orientalist artists similarly tended to depict worshippers in a variety of different positions within the same painting, rather than showing the figures in a unified, synchronised movement.