JOSHUA SHAW | An exotic landscape with figures smoking hookah pipes

Private collection, Philadelphia, USA.

Having spent his early years living and working in the United Kingdom, Joshua Shaw emigrated to the United States in 1817 on the recommendation of Benjamin West, the prominent American expatriate artist. Shaw was enthralled by his new country and, basing himself in Philadelphia, established a reputation as one of the nation's finest landscape painters. He frequently depicted the arrival of the first Western explorers in the New World; though the exact setting illustrated in the present painting is difficult to discern, the figures smoking hookah pipes while dressed in Islamic garb certainly allude to an exotic land.