A Guardian review of "The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting" (a show at the Tate, in 2008) mentioned this famous water colourist, in the context of Britain's relationship with the Near East, and we excerpt:
...
When Edward Said's ground-breaking Orientalism appeared in 1978, it articulated and theorised a disquiet that already existed - albeit in fragmented and anecdotal forms - in Arabic critical discourse. Orientalism does not discuss painting, but its critique provided a framework to understand one's own feelings of unease when faced with images of "odalisques" and slave markets and drug-dealers - the same unease evoked by skewed media representations of Arabs (and Muslims) today. Jean-Léon Gérôme, for example, may or may not have believed in France's mission civilisatrice; perhaps he only ever wanted to sell paintings. But in supplying images of indolence and cruelty he helped to nourish perceptions that eased the path of that mission. .... As Jean Genet remarked in Un captif amoureux, the mask of the image can be used to manipulate reality to sinister ends. [This is the context in which the Tate show is analyzed]
British artists found their way to the Arab and Turkish "Orient" in the run-up to Britain's colonial surge towards it ....
....[Lewis alone views this culture with some semblance of objectivity] ...Lewis's work [is] so attractive... Of all the "oriental" paintings I had come across, only those of Lewis beckoned me in. At the simplest level, the world he shows is a happy one, filled with sunlight, people, animals, flowers, food. But something else is transmitted from his surfaces: empathy. Lewis lived in Cairo for 10 years, and "went native" in adopting Egyptian dress.
.....
A lecture by Briony Llewellyn alerted me to Lewis's habit of painting himself into his pictures, and an article by Emily Weeks pointed out the ambiguities he deployed in, for example, The Carpet Seller (1860). A carefully staged self-portrait, it brings to mind Byron's satirical proposal to "sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, / Some samples of the finest Orientalism". ....
.....
[To understand why Lewis alone of European artists portrayed a wealthy happy culture, rather than one ravaged by cruelty] ... we need to step back slightly: in 1830 Muhammad Ali Pasha had (unwisely?) opened Palestine to western travellers in the cause of "modernisation", and Jerusalem soon became a focus for western powers jockeying for position. Much travel and Christian religious writing described the Holy Land as "cursed"; it was desolate, stagnant and suffering because it was inhabited by Jews and Muslims who rejected the gospel of Christ. One of the most powerful influences to arrive on the scene was the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, a missionary arm of the Anglican Church and a prototype of what today is called Christian Zionism. Its mission was to convert the Jews, but it was also to "ingather" them into Palestine to facilitate Armageddon. When the British Consulate was established in Jerusalem in 1839, both the first consul, William Young, and the second, James Finn, belonged to the society. ....
[ London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews endorsed].... the enterprise of in-gathering and settling Jews [there],,,, for only when the Jews were gathered in the Holy Land and the Messiah appeared would this desolate landscape find redemption.
....[Other artists]... came ready with an ideology and a fantasy to impose upon the landscape and the people, [while Lewis] observed, received the landscape and entered into the spirit of the place and its inhabitants. ....
When Lewis came to Cairo in 1841, Europeans - again welcomed into Egypt as part of Muhammad Ali Pasha's modernisation programme - were busy ripping off the country. Consular officials were crowbarring reliefs off temple walls; travellers were looting depositories of documents; dealers were tearing illustrations out of manuscripts - and artists were forging visions of harems and indolence and cruelty and passing them off as reality. Moreover, Britain had just - in coalition with Austria and the Ottoman Sultan - defeated Muhammad Ali Pasha's attempt to spread Egyptian hegemony into Syria. The spirit of the times would have made it natural for the 37-year-old Lewis to be part of the burgeoning imperial drive. The spirit of the times, ...[was] not his spirit.
Lewis's first Egyptian painting to be shown in England was The Hhareem. He exhibited it in 1850 (to avoid being fired from the Society of Painters in Watercolour for non-productivity) and gave his audience everything they desired: a slave-dealer displays a prize beauty to an oriental nobleman surrounded by his wives and attendants. Lewis supplies a long description of each woman and - with the detail of the painting and the idiosyncratic spelling of its title - stakes a high claim to authoritative knowledge and artistic mastery. The Hhareem established Lewis spectacularly at the head of his profession, and in 1855 he was elected president of the society. Yet he was already subverting the genre of the harem painting: the master of the house, far from being the lascivious cruel Turk of tradition, has a young fresh face, full of wonder; his new acquisition has something of a defiant stance, and the description places the painting firmly in the past, in Mamluk times. It declares itself a fantasy - and leaves open the question: whose?
Much of Lewis's work embodies good humour: in The Mid-day Meal (1875) everyone, including the servants, is enjoying something the white-bearded man on the left has just said. This painting, together with The Bezestein Bazaar (1872) and Outdoor Gossip (1873), captures its subjects' delight in good conversation and repartee. True, these men are not hunting, fighting or throwing javelins, but there is no trace of that "indolence" much cited by orientalist painters and commentators.
Another subversive and revelatory painting is And the Prayer of Faith Shall Save the Sick (1872), where a beautiful woman (resembling Lewis's wife, Marianne) reclines in her sickbed. A panel on the wall above her head bears a relief of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor, manifested as Sekhmet; the centre of the wall is inscribed with a quotation from the Qur'an: "We have embraced the faith, so forgive us." At the front of the picture, Lewis, turned discreetly away from the women, reads from the Holy Book.
....
Lewis entered into a true relationship with Cairo: the city gave him the colours, the light, the architecture - the material he needed to become a great artist. Unlike so many of his colleagues, though, he felt that the city demanded something of him in return. Cairo made Lewis interrogate himself, what he and his compatriots were doing, the artist's relationship to his material, his social and political role, his integrity and, finally, his historic responsibility. It was through this interrogation that he produced his masterpieces.
When Edward Said's ground-breaking Orientalism appeared in 1978, it articulated and theorised a disquiet that already existed - albeit in fragmented and anecdotal forms - in Arabic critical discourse. Orientalism does not discuss painting, but its critique provided a framework to understand one's own feelings of unease when faced with images of "odalisques" and slave markets and drug-dealers - the same unease evoked by skewed media representations of Arabs (and Muslims) today. Jean-Léon Gérôme, for example, may or may not have believed in France's mission civilisatrice; perhaps he only ever wanted to sell paintings. But in supplying images of indolence and cruelty he helped to nourish perceptions that eased the path of that mission. .... As Jean Genet remarked in Un captif amoureux, the mask of the image can be used to manipulate reality to sinister ends. [This is the context in which the Tate show is analyzed]
British artists found their way to the Arab and Turkish "Orient" in the run-up to Britain's colonial surge towards it ....
....[Lewis alone views this culture with some semblance of objectivity] ...Lewis's work [is] so attractive... Of all the "oriental" paintings I had come across, only those of Lewis beckoned me in. At the simplest level, the world he shows is a happy one, filled with sunlight, people, animals, flowers, food. But something else is transmitted from his surfaces: empathy. Lewis lived in Cairo for 10 years, and "went native" in adopting Egyptian dress.
.....
A lecture by Briony Llewellyn alerted me to Lewis's habit of painting himself into his pictures, and an article by Emily Weeks pointed out the ambiguities he deployed in, for example, The Carpet Seller (1860). A carefully staged self-portrait, it brings to mind Byron's satirical proposal to "sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, / Some samples of the finest Orientalism". ....
.....
[To understand why Lewis alone of European artists portrayed a wealthy happy culture, rather than one ravaged by cruelty] ... we need to step back slightly: in 1830 Muhammad Ali Pasha had (unwisely?) opened Palestine to western travellers in the cause of "modernisation", and Jerusalem soon became a focus for western powers jockeying for position. Much travel and Christian religious writing described the Holy Land as "cursed"; it was desolate, stagnant and suffering because it was inhabited by Jews and Muslims who rejected the gospel of Christ. One of the most powerful influences to arrive on the scene was the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, a missionary arm of the Anglican Church and a prototype of what today is called Christian Zionism. Its mission was to convert the Jews, but it was also to "ingather" them into Palestine to facilitate Armageddon. When the British Consulate was established in Jerusalem in 1839, both the first consul, William Young, and the second, James Finn, belonged to the society. ....
[ London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews endorsed].... the enterprise of in-gathering and settling Jews [there],,,, for only when the Jews were gathered in the Holy Land and the Messiah appeared would this desolate landscape find redemption.
....[Other artists]... came ready with an ideology and a fantasy to impose upon the landscape and the people, [while Lewis] observed, received the landscape and entered into the spirit of the place and its inhabitants. ....
When Lewis came to Cairo in 1841, Europeans - again welcomed into Egypt as part of Muhammad Ali Pasha's modernisation programme - were busy ripping off the country. Consular officials were crowbarring reliefs off temple walls; travellers were looting depositories of documents; dealers were tearing illustrations out of manuscripts - and artists were forging visions of harems and indolence and cruelty and passing them off as reality. Moreover, Britain had just - in coalition with Austria and the Ottoman Sultan - defeated Muhammad Ali Pasha's attempt to spread Egyptian hegemony into Syria. The spirit of the times would have made it natural for the 37-year-old Lewis to be part of the burgeoning imperial drive. The spirit of the times, ...[was] not his spirit.
Lewis's first Egyptian painting to be shown in England was The Hhareem. He exhibited it in 1850 (to avoid being fired from the Society of Painters in Watercolour for non-productivity) and gave his audience everything they desired: a slave-dealer displays a prize beauty to an oriental nobleman surrounded by his wives and attendants. Lewis supplies a long description of each woman and - with the detail of the painting and the idiosyncratic spelling of its title - stakes a high claim to authoritative knowledge and artistic mastery. The Hhareem established Lewis spectacularly at the head of his profession, and in 1855 he was elected president of the society. Yet he was already subverting the genre of the harem painting: the master of the house, far from being the lascivious cruel Turk of tradition, has a young fresh face, full of wonder; his new acquisition has something of a defiant stance, and the description places the painting firmly in the past, in Mamluk times. It declares itself a fantasy - and leaves open the question: whose?
Much of Lewis's work embodies good humour: in The Mid-day Meal (1875) everyone, including the servants, is enjoying something the white-bearded man on the left has just said. This painting, together with The Bezestein Bazaar (1872) and Outdoor Gossip (1873), captures its subjects' delight in good conversation and repartee. True, these men are not hunting, fighting or throwing javelins, but there is no trace of that "indolence" much cited by orientalist painters and commentators.
Another subversive and revelatory painting is And the Prayer of Faith Shall Save the Sick (1872), where a beautiful woman (resembling Lewis's wife, Marianne) reclines in her sickbed. A panel on the wall above her head bears a relief of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor, manifested as Sekhmet; the centre of the wall is inscribed with a quotation from the Qur'an: "We have embraced the faith, so forgive us." At the front of the picture, Lewis, turned discreetly away from the women, reads from the Holy Book.
....
Lewis entered into a true relationship with Cairo: the city gave him the colours, the light, the architecture - the material he needed to become a great artist. Unlike so many of his colleagues, though, he felt that the city demanded something of him in return. Cairo made Lewis interrogate himself, what he and his compatriots were doing, the artist's relationship to his material, his social and political role, his integrity and, finally, his historic responsibility. It was through this interrogation that he produced his masterpieces.
And another example of Lewis's masterpieces is "The Commentator on the Koran."
We can see here the evidence for the opinions above. And a self-portrait of John Frederick Lewis.
We can see here the evidence for the opinions above. And a self-portrait of John Frederick Lewis.
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