A Cairo Bazaar - The Della'l

John Frederick Lewis, 1875, Watercolour, heightened with bodycolour and gum arabic

John Frederick Lewis is the one of finest of the Orientalist painters. Because of his painstaking ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ technique, his finished paintings are rare. Of all of the European and American artists to make the Eastern pilgrimage in the nineteenth century, he was the only one to stay on for an uninterrupted ten years. He settled in the native quarters of Cairo in 1841, returning to London in 1851 with a body of work from which he drew inspiration for the next twenty-five years.

John Frederick Lewis’s character was a paradox: his dandy nature manifested itself in London in the most fashionable and extrovert clothes and in Cairo in the robes of an Egyptian nobleman. This lifestyle was in contrast to his fervent wish to escape from the ‘civilisation’ of city life. His greatest pleasure was to spend long periods in the desert hinterland, his encampment under the Egyptian starlit nights.

Painted in the year before his death, A Cairo Bazaar is a jewel-like, sparkling reminiscence of the colourful, exotic city in which he had spent so many happy years. John Frederick Lewis had lived in a grand merchant’s house close to both the Mosque of Sultan Hassan and to the shady, narrow courtyards of the souk. In this watercolour a tall, elegantly dressed merchant laden with the fine treasures of the bazaar barters for an exquisitely embroidered cloth. In some ways, this figure can be seen as a mirror of the artist himself, who lived, according to William Thackery, like an ‘Oriental Prince’. After his visit to Cairo, Thackery wrote: Frederick is going about with a great beard and crooked sword, dressed up like an odious Turk.

Despite the critical acclaim that his exhibits earned him, he was disheartened by the lack of financial reward. In the late 1850s he almost abandoned watercolour, exhibiting mainly, but not exclusively, in oils. In 1859, his election to Associate of the Royal Academy prompted a letter from his old friend David Roberts the next day, addressed to: John F Lewis RA, RA, RA, RA, RA, RA! John Ruskin, who formed a close friendship with the artist, wrote, after his death: Watercolour drawing can be carried no further; nothing has been left unfinished or untold.

Source: Artnet

LEWIS, John Frederick (1805-1876), British painter, son of F. C. Lewis, engraver, was born in London. He was elected in 1827 associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colors, of which he became full member in 1829 and president in 1855; he resigned in 1858, and was made associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and academician in 1865. Much of his earlier life was spent in Spain, Italy and the East, but he returned to England in 1851 and for the remainder of his career devoted himself almost exclusively to Eastern subjects, which he treated with extraordinary care and minuteness of finish, and with much beauty of technical method. He is represented by a picture, Edfou: Upper Egypt, in the National Gallery of British Art. He achieved equal eminence in both oil and water-color painting.

Source: 1911 Edition Encyclopedia