John Frederick Lewis, R.A.

John Miller (to 1858)
Sale: Christie's, London, May 20, 1858 (lot 88, listed as property of J. Miller, Redpath collection and buyer unknown)
Possibly, Langton (to 1862)
Possibly,  Agnew
F.R. Leyland (to 1872)
Sale: Christie's, London March 1872 (lot 24)
Agnew 
John Knowles (to 1877)
Sale: Christie's, London, May 19, 1877, lot 57
Bt White
Humphrey Roberts, Esq. (by 1897; date of work given as '1856') 
Mathaf Ltd., London
Borghi & Co., New York

London, Old Watercolour Society, 1855, no. 150

The Literary Gazette, May 5, 1855, p. 282
The Portfolio, 1892, p. 95
A.G. (Alfred George) Temple, Painting in the Queen's Reign, London, 1897, p. 143
Michael (Major General J.M.H.) Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. (1805-1876), Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p. 92, no. 562
Gerald M. Ackerman, Les Orientalistes de L'Ecole Britannique, Paris, 1991, p. 202, illustrated
Briony Llewellyn and Charles Newton, In Knowledge of the Orientals Quite One of Themselves,' in Interpreting the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East, Reading, England, 2001, pp. 38-9, illustrated p. 39

Laid down, colors are bright and fresh, possible pin dots of loss underneath young boy's elbow and to the left of the camel's neck.
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Exhibited in the same year that he was elected President of the Old Watercolour Society, Greetings in the Desert is one of the most important Orientalist watercolors by John Frederick Lewis to be offered for sale in recent years.  Typical of this acclaimed British painter are the exquisite rendering of incidental detail, the compelling evocation of brilliant sunlight, and the engaging subject matter - a moment of exchange or encounter, set in the Middle East.

The picture depicts a greeting between two Arab men, who have momentarily halted their camel caravans in the vast expanse of Egypt's Sinai desert.   They extend their right hands as if to shake in standard European fashion, but their unclasped fingers suggest that they are in fact merely touching palms, as Bedouin custom demanded (see Frederick William Stewart [4th Marquess of Londonderry and Lord Castlereagh], A Journey to Damascus through Egypt, Nubia, Arabia Petraea, Palestine and Syria, London, 1847, p 284).  (The term 'Bedouin' comprises several tribes of nomadic herders and traders located throughout the Middle East and North Africa.)  The young servant of one of the men - probably the figure on the right, as he is dressed in the same brown and white stripes - joins the scene as well, his riding stick tucked at his side. A scruffy Armonty dog, its head just visible at the bottom edge of the picture, crooks its neck and follows the boy's gaze.   Though often a sign of a work's having been cut down or otherwise manipulated, this fractional view is in fact typical of Lewis, and a favorite compositional device.

The men, both bearded, are distinguished one from another by their headdresses and robes.  (The Art Journal, in its review of the oil version of this picture, believed that the differences 'may define respectively the Arab of the city and the Arab of the desert, or, some other distinction of condition or country' [p.164]; see below for further details regarding the oil.)  The man on the left wears a neatly wrapped white turban, while the man on the right wears a red striped kafiya.  This square piece of cloth has been folded diagonally, creating a simple triangular shape.  The silk cord that usually secures the cloth to the head is absent, suggesting that the infamous desert winds have stilled - at least for now.  His silk and cotton qumbaz (robe) displays a common blue-and-white striped pattern.  It is crossed in the front and held closed by an embroidered red fabric cummerbund.  Around his shoulders is a heavy brown and white striped abayeh, a traditional outer garment made of coarse hand-woven wool or wool and cotton blend.   (As previously noted, the servant wears a similar, vertically-striped abayeh, but, in this instance, it covers a thin, loose-fitting white galabeyah, or ankle-length cotton robe.)  Many of these articles of clothing - and indeed the bearded man himself - reappear in other works by Lewis.  A strong case has been made that this oft-repeated figure is a self-portrait of the artist, dressed in Arab clothes.  This subversion of what at first appears to be a carefully rendered, and fairly straightforward, transcription of Middle Eastern life is typical of Lewis, and may help to explain the unending fascination of scholars, collectors, and popular audiences with his work, from the nineteenth century until today.

The left arm of this ambiguous figure - is it an Arab?  is it a fantastic representation of the artist? - rests comfortably on the curve of his camel's neck.  These animals were the constant companions of the Bedouin, providing them with everything from transportation and commerce to food, shelter, and fuel. In his youth, Lewis had made his name as an animal painter and his expertise in the genre is well demonstrated here: from the tufts of soft hair underneath the camels' chins to their impossibly long eyelashes, to the wrinkles of skin around their lips and along their undulating necks, Lewis misses no detail of their peculiar anatomy. 

Lewis's representation of the tassled saddles and bridles of the camels is no less precise, and is integral to the formal poetry of the composition.  The two pommels of the wooden saddle rise to the height of the camels' ears, like the points of distant pyramids, and the saddle pads, stuffed with straw or palm leaves, mold to the shape of the camel's head below.  The woven geometries of the saddlebag, laid across the pads for added comfort, exhibit traditional sedu patterns.  The browns, creams and blacks of the open grid design reflect the colors of undyed wool, gathered from the Bedouin's flocks of sheep. 

That Lewis would demonstrate such a sophisticated understanding of Bedouin custom and culture, and, at the same time, endeavor to subvert it with the tongue-in-cheek inclusion of a doubtful 'Arab' figure, should be expected from an artist who spent ten years living 'far away from the haunts of European civilization' in Egypt, and whose own biography continually shifted between professionalism and playful self-fashioning. Lewis's colorful reputation had been established years earlier, with the publication in 1846 of Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by the great Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.  In this humorous account of the author's travels, Thackeray described being reunited with his old friend Lewis in Cairo, in the grand old Mamluk house he now occupied.  There he found not the London man-about-town he had once known, but a 'languid Lotus-eater' who led the 'dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life' of a privileged bey (gentleman).  In addition to abandoning most European manners and customs, Lewis had adopted elaborate Turkish clothing, and sported a 'Damascus scimitar' on his thigh.  And while this urbane lifestyle was a welcome relief from the strictures of Victorian society, even it proved to be too much for the artist: Lewis much preferred 'life in the desert, - under the tents, with still more nothing to do than in Cairo; now smoking, now cantering on Arabs, and no crowd to jostle you; solemn contemplations of the stars at night, as the camels were picketed, and the fires and pipes were lighted' (pp. 282-91).

Though very little additional information is known about Lewis's years in Egypt between 1841 and 1851, in large part due to the smug silence of the artist himself, aspects of it can be determined by the nearly six hundred watercolors and drawings that Lewis made while there.  They reveal his interests, his travels, and even, on occasion, the faces of those he knew.  Together with the costumes and artifacts the artist collected, these highly personal documents became the foundation of his paintings of harem interiors, mosques, bazaars, and desert encampments, which he made and exhibited after his return to London in 1851. The details of this picture, for example, might derive from the 'charming portfolio of sketches' that Lewis made on a trip to the Sinai in 1843 (letter from James William Wild to Joseph Bonomi, 21 June 1843, private collection).   Certainly it is related to a drawing once owned by John Ruskin, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1906 (for this image see: Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Painters of the Nineteenth Century, exh. cat., London, 1978, no. 73, illustrated p. 55) several drawings of Bedouin figures and their camels, all executed in Egypt, were also listed in the artist's estate sale of 1877, and may have provided further points of departure (see The Remaining Works of that Distinguished Artist, John F. Lewis, R.A. . . , Christie's, 4 and 7 May 1877). 

Unlike many artists who traveled in the Middle East, and sought to impress their audiences with a panoramic view of all they surveyed, Lewis chose to focus on a small range of subjects, and investigate them with a remarkable intensity of vision.  Between 1853 and 1860, Lewis painted and exhibited no less than 10 desert scenes, whose similarities with the present work are difficult to miss.   If read in chronological order, each work becomes an episode in a narrative series, and the patterns of repetition they exhibit - the same figure appearing in multiple works, for example - only adds intrigue to the story. 

The tendency to repeat compositional elements was reinforced by Lewis's habit of executing virtually all his major compositions after 1850 in both oils and watercolors.  (The present work, with the extended title 'Selamat Teiyibeen' ['greetings' or 'peace to you'] was repeated in oils, as has been noted.  It was exhibited in 1856 at the Royal Academy [no. 101].  The oil is slightly larger and lacks the charming detail of the dog's head.  It was sold on June 20, 1986 at Christie's [lot 92].)  Remarkably, this shift in medium did little to compromise Lewis's spectacularly painstaking style: often using sable brushes and fine papers and panels purchased from the well-established firm of Charles Roberson & Company, and typically incorporating bodycolor (watercolor mixed with white paint) into his works, Lewis was able to achieve extraordinary jewel-like tones and intricate detail in every work of art. When Greetings in the Desert was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1855, for example, it earned the following praise:

"Mr. John F. Lewis again contributes two of those Oriental subjects of minute liny [sic] handling, and elaborately finished detail, which stamp his works with so strong a singularity.  The Well in the Desert (135) and The Greetings in the Desert (150), are a pair of these strange pictures, which naturally excite the curiosity, and gratify it by an exhibition of literal facts, such as is rarely to be met with in the productions of water-colour art." (Literary Gazette, 5 May 1855, p 282)

One year later, John Ruskin would wax poetic about another of Lewis's watercolors, in uncannily pertinent terms:

If the reader will take a magnifying glass to it, and examine it touch by touch, he will find that, literally, any four square inches of it contain as much as an ordinary water-colour drawing . . . Let him examine, for instance, with a good lens, the eyes of the camels, and he will find that there is as much painting beneath their drooping fringes as would, with most painters, be thought enough for the whole head . . .' (Academy Notes, 1856, 74). 

The year that Greetings in the Desert was exhibited was of profound importance for Lewis's career.  He was elected President of the Old Watercolour Society, and several of his drawings were on display in Paris, as part of the Universal Exhibition. So too, Lewis had just sold 140 minor sketches and studies at auction in London, earning him a respectable £600.  Finally, and perhaps more important for the scholar than for the artist himself, Lewis's personal dealings with his patrons are well documented in this year - a rare exception in Lewis's frustratingly scant personal archive. Of particular interest is a letter written to John Noble early in 1855: here, Lewis asks 'Should it [the watercolor Noble has commissioned] not be totally different from the oil pictures? . . . I suggest an out-of-door scene, say in the desert, camels, etc.'  (Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Autogr. C. 17, fols. 232-3, 24 January 1855).   Though Noble never owned the present work, this exchange reveals that the subject was pressing on Lewis's mind (see also Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Autogr. C. 17, fols. 228-9, 23 April 1854; and National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, MSL/1903/9000/105).

As the 1850s wore on, Lewis would become increasingly discouraged by the prices that his watercolors fetched - indeed, he once wrote that he found the medium 'thoroly [sic] unremunerative' and likened the process of watercolor painting to rolling a stone uphill (letter from John Frederick Lewis to Thomas Griffith, 3 February 1858, private collection).  In 1859, Lewis would resign from the Presidency of the Old Watercolour Society, and shift his attentions to the Royal Academy, of which he became a full member in 1865.  He continued to work in watercolor throughout his life, however, and, in the opinion of many critics and art historians, excelled in this medium above all others.  Lewis's insistence that his watercolors be accorded the same status as oils encouraged a complexity of composition and a level of finish rarely witnessed in works of this kind, and which ensures their importance today.

Lewis's paintings, including several of his desert scenes, are featured prominently in The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, a major traveling exhibition organized by Tate Britain