O n 22 October 2019, thirty-six works from the legendary Najd Collection together sold for a record total of £33.5 million, with nine further records broken for the greatest exponents of the genre. Following this major market-defining moment, Sotheby’s is set to offer a further selection of rigorously-painted historic scenes of the Middle East as it was experienced by intrepid explorers in the nineteenth-century. An online auction of more than thirty rarely-seen works by leading artists including Jean-Léon Gérôme, Gustav Bauernfeind and Ludwig Deutsch will open to bidders on Monday 8 June and begin closing from 2pm BST on Thursday 11 June.

I n a letter to his mother, Bauernfeind remarked that ‘you have to live in a country like this a long time before becoming even superficially familiar with all it has to offer.’ Bauernfeind painted this work upon his return to Germany following his third and final trip to Palestine. It marks the culmination of his ambitions for his canvases of Jaffa.

No detail escaped Bauernfeind’s eye, and he took delight in the streets, buildings and mosques of the city, as well as ‘the procession of characters’ who populated them. In this monumental painting, a group of dervishes and Sufis leads a religious procession, possibly of pilgrims embarking on the annual Hajj to Mecca.

This work comes to auction for the first time in over forty years, following the record £3.7 million achieved for the artist’s Market in Jaffa, which was sold from the Najd collection last year.

A t the sale of select works from the Najd Collection last year, Deutsch’s The Tribute sold for a record £4.3 million, which doubled the previous record set for the artist in 2013. In this sale several more Deutsch works will be offered.

The noble and elegant subject of The Scholar may have been inspired by Deutsch’s encounters with scholars at Cairo’s famous university, El Azhar Madrassah. The figure’s distinguished dress reflects his status and wealth, since only the most expensive black dyes stood up to scrutiny under bright light. With an expression of intense concentration, the scholar sits back to reflect on the passage he has just read in his leather-bound Qur’an.

By exploring the theme of literacy in Egyptian culture, Deutsch is both celebrating its glorious history and underlining its importance in both secular and religious life, at a time when modern innovations in the printing process were threatening the traditional role of professional scribes.

I n the first tranche of lots offered from the Najd Collection last year, Gérôme was represented by five works, one of which, the exceptional and cinematic Riders Crossing the Desert, set a new artist record at £3.1 million.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1857, Gérôme painted this masterful canvas when he was at the height of his career following his successful inaugural trip to Egypt in 1856. The work depicts handcuffed prisoners led under guard across a sandstorm to their uncertain fate. Gérôme paints the plight of the conscripts with an objectivity that evokes compassion and, with great skill, he contrasts the precision of the figures in the foreground with the prisoners in the distance who are almost completely engulfed by the dust storm.

Having witnessed such a scene in Asyut, the artist based his composition not only on his usual sketches but also on photographs he had taken. Arnauts, or bashi-bazouks, were of particular interest to Gérôme. They populated his work from the late 1850s onwards. Mercenaries in the Ottoman army, they hailed from Albania and the Balkans and were deployed across the Empire, including in Cairo, where the artist would have encountered them wearing their distinctive white pleated kilts.

I n 1890, Ernst travelled to Constantinople, a trip that had a profound impact on his artistic output. He preferred to focus on Turkey’s traditional Muslim heritage and traditional skills and trades, despite the capital of the Ottoman Empire experiencing rapid modernisation and westernisation.

Working from photos or his own sketches and memory, he made a series of paintings of mosques, and this work depicts the façade of Sultan Selim’s tomb, located in the precincts of Hagia Sophia.

In this richly finished work, a man stands at the entrance of a palace, yielding weapons to discourage any trespassers. An interesting mix of architectural and ethnographic elements, the composition incorporates colourful tiles and Moorish decorations, which collectively recall the melding of styles of the Alhambra palace in Granada.