John Frederick Lewis, RA, POWS

(British, 1804-1876)

A Reception in the Harem

Footnotes

Provenance
Possibly, William Volkins, Dealers in Drawings and Watercolours.
The collection of Abel Buckley of Ryecroft Hall, Ashton-under-Lyme, Manchester, England, acquired by 1878.
The collection of Stephen George Holland of 56 Porchester Terrace, London, by 1891 (called The Reception).
His Sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, 26 June 1908, lot 230, as A Lady Receiving Visitors in the Mandarah of a House in Cairo, 29 ¼ x 41 in.
With Thomas Agnew & Sons (acquired from the above sale for £630.0.0).
The collection of Percy Holland, son of Stephen George Holland (purchased from the above in June 1908).
His sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 25 June 1937, lot 26.
With Rayner MacConnal, London (acquired from the above sale for £100.5.0).
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 11 March 1960, lot 87 (sold as Property of a Gentleman).
With Frost and Reed, London (acquired from the above sale for £800).
Private collection, USA (purchased from the above in October 1961).

Exhibited
Manchester, Royal Institution, Art Treasures Exhibition, 1878, lent by Abel Buckley Esq.
Manchester, Royal Jubilee Exhibition, 1887, no. 1585, lent by Abel Buckley Esq. (as A Reception in the Harem).
London, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition of Old Masters and Deceased Masters of the British School, 1891, no. 142, lent by Stephen George Holland (as The Reception).
London, Royal Watercolour Society Art Club, 5a Pall Mall East, Exhibition of Works by Members of the Club Together with a Selection of Works by the late J.D. Harding and the late J.F. Lewis, 8-11 February 1898, lent by Stephen George Holland (as The Reception).

Literature
Alfred George Temple, The Art of Painting in the Queen's Reign; being a glance at some of the painters and paintings of the British school during the last sixty years, London, 1897, p. 143 (as Reception in the Hareem).
Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. (1805-1876), Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p. 39, p. 42, note 21, fig. 64. cat no. 612, pp. 97-98.
Harley Preston, 'The Harem - Painting Behind the Scenes', in Art Bulletin of Victoria 28, 1987, p. 86.
Emily M. Weeks, 'Oil and Water: (Re)Discovering John Frederick Lewis (1804–76)', in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 12.2, Autumn 2013.
Emily M. Weeks, Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and the Art of Orientalism, New Haven, CT and London, 2014, p. 203.
Emily M. Weeks, 'The tools of his trade: the relationship between John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and Charles Roberson & Company'. in Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin 5, 2014, p. 101, p. 103, fig. 3, p. 105, p. 106, note 12.
Béatrice Laurent, 'Juicy Fruit in the Harem: Pomological Symbolism in some Paintings by John Frederick Lewis', in Visual Culture in Britain 17.1, 2016, pp. 9-10.
James Parry, Orientalist Lives: Western Artists in the Middle East 1830-1920, Cairo and New York, 2018, p. 150, p. 272, note 13.


Rediscovering A Masterpiece in Watercolour: A Reception in the Harem by John Frederick Lewis

John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) was one of England's most prominent 19th-century painters. A master in both oils and watercolours, he was elected President of London's Old Watercolour Society in 1855 and, upon his resignation three years later, was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and a full member in 1865. The paintings exhibited at both venues earned him effusive praise from contemporary art critics for their jewel-like colours and intricate details, which audiences pored over in the galleries and eagerly purchased for their homes. Lewis's ten-year period of residency in Egypt in the 1840s with his young wife Marian Harper led to the widespread belief that the numerous and incredibly popular scenes of the MENASA region (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) he produced after 1850 were the work of a cultural 'insider'. This sentiment was supported by a rare, first-hand account of Lewis in Cairo, written by the journalist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) and published in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo in 1846.¹ Thackeray famously described Lewis's 'dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life' in that city, and his enviable existence as a 'languid Lotus-eater'. In 1865, a writer for the Illustrated London News doubled down on Thackeray's observations, asserting that Lewis 'ultimately became in knowledge of the Orientals quite one of themselves'.²


Water and Oil
The extraordinary watercolour painting presented here, not exhibited publicly for over 60 years, is a larger version of a celebrated oil painting by Lewis at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.³ The subtle differences between the two works offer insights into Lewis's professional practice and ambitions, while their shared subject matter reveals tantalizing information about his life in Egypt and his strong political opinions.⁴

A comparison of the watercolour version of A Reception in the Harem with the lauded oil of 1873 is instructive with regard to Lewis's methods. While the right-hand sides of these two pictures are very similar, for example, the left-hand sides are not. The oil has fewer figures here, and includes only a portion of the table, which has been set with different fruits. Also in the oil, the face of the woman reclining on the blue divan is shown in profile, whereas in the watercolour she offers a more engaging three-quarters view. In the watercolour picture, her lips are parted, as if she is participating in the conversation with her attendant, rather than simply listening to her words. In general, in the watercolour, faces and hands are more thoughtfully executed, and express a more discernible emotion or attitude. The kneeling girl on the right-hand side of the composition, for example, kept company by a gazelle, has far more delicate features than her counterpart in oil, and the hand of the bowing female attendant opposite her is turned more gracefully and unambiguously toward the sky. Each of her fingers is articulated with the thinnest thread of paint, and the rose-white flesh of her upturned wrist is almost palpably soft; in the oil, the hand is not nearly so well resolved.

Along the left edge of the watercolour is a line that runs from top to bottom, marking where two sheets of paper have been joined. This suggests that, like many of Lewis's more ambitious watercolours, it was extended at some point during the painting process.⁵ This, and the level of additional detail contained in the watercolour version may be explained by Lewis's notorious dissatisfaction with the economic potential of watercolour in England (a thoroughly 'unremunerative' medium, he said) and his continual attempts to overcome this financial problem by making larger and more elaborate works.⁶

Years before this watercolour's completion in 1873, Lewis had taken great pains to perfect an idiosyncratic approach to the medium in order to improve audience's perceptions of its worth. By mixing watercolour pigments with Chinese white he discovered they could rival the look of oils. This, in addition to his precise and laborious brushstrokes, might persuade potential patrons that a watercolour was far more than an informal study or quick preliminary sketch. By the early 1860s, Lewis began to systematically produce two nearly identical versions of a work, one in oil, destined for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and one more elaborate version in watercolour for collectors, which he advertised for a comparable price. A Reception in the Harem, when sold in 1908 by its second owner, the well-known philanthropist Stephen George Holland (1817–1908), achieved the remarkable price of £630.0.0. This was well above some prices paid for Holland's oils.

The value of A Reception in the Harem had been recognized well before Holland's ownership. After its initial purchase by the prominent Manchester collector and industrialist Abel Buckley (1835–1908) sometime before 1878, it was widely publicized through exhibitions and reviews. By 1887, Lewis's watercolour was attracting attention at Manchester's Royal Jubilee Exhibition, an extraordinary celebration of that city's modern art collections, and in particular, of watercolours in private hands. This was, in fact, the second time Buckley had lent the painting to such a significant local cultural event. In 1878, it was exhibited at the Royal Manchester Institution with his name attached. Later, in 1898, it was lent by Stephen Holland to a special exhibition at the Royal Water-Colour Society Art Club, where it was highly praised.⁷


Harem and Home
Interest in the painting's subject matter – a reception in an Eastern harem - had grown in Britain with the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) in the mid-18th century, and had only increased since.⁸ Her detailed, first-hand accounts of fashionable women's daily life in Turkey, published in 1763, filled in the tantalizing blanks that had previously existed in the public's imagination, due to the gendered exclusivity and sacrosanct nature of the harem space. A century later, these literary descriptions would pale in comparison with Lewis's steady stream of works, scores of which now offered audiences a technicolour window into harem life.⁹

This particular painting illustrates a spacious room in an ornate Islamic home, rendered in sharply receding, one-point perspective, with several figures inside. Three recessed bays, high ceilings, and an open expanse of floor occupying the entire bottom half of the picture characterize the room. Sunlight floods this interior space, streaming in through mashrabiyya (turned wood) window screens and dissolving much of its contents into dazzling geometric patterns. In the centre of the room is a sunken reflecting pool, its marble borders inlaid with coloured stones. It contains a small but elaborately carved conical fountain. A wooden ceiling, brightly painted, and plain wooden structural beams complete the setting architecturally.

The lady of the house is placed just right of centre, in the middle recess of the room. She is draped languorously across a brilliant blue couch, or divan, with an attendant before her. This female servant gazes distractedly beyond the limits of the picture plane, a fan of feathers hanging at her side. As in so many of Lewis's pictures, the look outward serves to collapse the boundaries between the viewer's space and that occupied by the figure. To the left of these two women a row of attendants or, possibly, visitors wait expectantly. They crane their necks toward the central pair, some almost doubled over in anticipation and enthusiasm. Each of them is dressed in vaguely Egyptian clothing: long robes, gathered pants, head-shawls, and a red tarboosh or fez. The colours of their garments are reflected in those of the stained-glass windows above.

On the right-hand side of the picture, a young woman kneels at the edge of the pool, a gazelle beside her. A clear grid of strong diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines contains all the elements of people, animals, and interior design features. Thus, though the profuse details of the picture are almost overwhelming, a sense of order, clarity, and compositional coherence is maintained. Convincing perspective and the illusion of brilliant sunlight, moreover, lend to Lewis's picture an air of scientific objectivity.

Lewis's intimation that the scene was an actual moment in time, an event witnessed by the artist during his decade-long sojourn abroad, and that perfect organization was being maintained even in the midst of ornamental excess, seem also to inform his treatment of the rows of female figures. These young women – all sumptuously but decorously dressed – demonstrate various forms of etiquette appropriate to members of 19th-century Egyptian society. Organized, well-behaved, and mindful of their places, they contain their enthusiasm with well-rehearsed control, suggesting that both social hierarchies and social graces are being kept as firmly in place as their own moral conduct. Despite some contemporaries' beliefs about the iniquities of the region, and of its harem women in particular, this domestic situation is presented as one as exquisite and pure as the manner in which it was painted.¹⁰

In addition to the demeanour of the women and the formal geometry of the scene, Lewis suggests conservatism, propriety, and veracity through other compositional features as well. The physical and symbolic relationship between furnishings and social practice in Egypt were of the utmost importance at this time, particularly with regard to women and the home.¹¹ The position of the central female figure, for example, draped across the blue divan, alludes correctly to contemporary Egyptian custom. The chief lady of the house (usually the first or principal wife in the harem) was always granted this privileged situation due to her exalted status among members of a gathered party. The fan the attendant figure holds is an appropriate accoutrement for a respectable Muslim woman, protecting her from the elements as well as from strangers' glances. Finally, the gazelle in the lower right-hand side of the picture was a common house-pet of the Egyptian upper classes in the 19th century.¹²

The many facts within Lewis's painting are matched by an equal number of artistic liberties, each of which was intentional and pointed. The most obvious of these is the setting of the charming scene: the mandarah of the house. As the most informed Egyptophiles in his audience would have known immediately, this space was typically reserved for men and their male guests, not for the women and attendants that Lewis shows.¹³ Their transposition here from upper-story harem rooms, sequestered for their privacy, was not without a broader significance: One of the long-standing and best-known justifications for intervention by Britain in the affairs of Egypt and the MENASA region in the mid-19th century was its promised liberation of the 'oppressed' and 'sexually-exploited' women it envisioned there. The harem in particular was seen as a microcosm of all that was wrong with the region: it epitomized its sexual excesses and its 'barbaric' gender prescriptions, and it acted as a metaphor for the unjustness of its local governments. Between 1872 and 1874 – precisely the time of A Reception in the Harem's execution – the British government made strong efforts to intervene on behalf of (white) harem women in several MENASA countries. In 1873, Sir Henry Elliot, British ambassador in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), learned that slave families were being separated when sold. In an official break with British non-interventionist policy in the region, Elliot made demands to the Foreign Minister, Halil Pasha, to end the practice immediately.¹⁴

Such examples of British officials' outrage at women's poor treatment abroad were more than legitimizations for slowly increasing administrative intervention. These actions were also a necessary tool and demonstration of the extension of those powers beyond the formal borders of the British Empire. If the severe oppression of women in foreign countries was made clear, British women could ignore or at least favourably compare their own restrictive domestic situations.¹⁵ A contributor to Bentley's Miscellany, for example, wrote the following in 1850: 'Let her [the Turkish harem woman's] sister in the Western world, in the midst of her joys, think with pity on these sufferings, and when sorrow's cloud seems darkest, let her not repine, but learn resignation to her lot, as she compares it with the condition of the women of the East; let her be grateful that she lives in an age and land where woman is regarded as the helpmate and consolation of man, by whom her love is justly deemed the prize of his life'.¹⁶

The fact that Lewis's harem women are depicted as in no need of aid or rescue but enjoying liberties in decorous fashion, disrupts these political party lines. That the reclining figure on the blue divan is modelled after Lewis's wife Marian, moreover, and that her ornate surroundings were inspired by the mandarah, or reception room, of their elaborate Cairo home, adds two significant twists to the story.¹⁷ Rather than aligning his views with Britain's domestic and imperial ambitions, Lewis offers an alternative commentary on British policy both at home and abroad.

If the surprising political messages within A Reception in the Harem's were too complex for most of Lewis's enthusiasts to realize and process, or if they did not care, the surface of his painting was likely interesting enough. Just prior to his return to England from Egypt in 1850, Lewis had sent a watercolour to the Old Watercolour Society – the first to be exhibited by the artist at that institution in almost ten years. Called The Hareem, it set a new bar for the popularity of a watercolour painting in Britain, in both its technique and the originality of its theme. Six years later, Lewis set the bar even higher, producing A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842. This heroically-sized watercolour, today at the Yale Center for British Art, attracted the attention of audiences throughout the London art world, including the 19th century's most important art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900). As Ruskin extolled, ' . . . [A Frank Encampment] will one day be among things which men will come to England from far away to see, and will go back to their homes saying, 'I have seen it,' as people come back now from Venice, saying they have seen Titian's 'Peter Martyr'; or from Milan, saying they have seen the 'Sposalizio.' I have no hesitation in ranking it among the most wonderful pictures in the world . . .'¹⁸ As a third Orientalist watercolour painting making waves in art circles and marking a high point in 19th-century British art, A Reception in the Harem must too be heralded as an unqualified success by one of the country's most beloved artists.


Man and Myth
Born in London in 1804, the son of a noted German engraver, Lewis gained recognition as an animal-painter from an early age.¹⁹ Together with his close friend and later rival in the field Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), Lewis received commissions for his depictions of dogs and scenes of fox hunting from King George IV and other members of the British aristocracy. In 1827, however, Lewis's career dramatically changed direction. In March of that year, he was elected an associate of the Old Watercolour Society and he began exhibiting there regularly, giving up oil paints until the late 1850s. Now his pictures showed a broader range of subject-matter including, for the first time, landscapes, architecture, figure studies, and genre scenes, all of which appealed to his new middle-class patrons.

Also in 1827, Lewis made his first European tour. In Venice, he was exposed to a mixture of cultures and ethnic groups: his sketches of a 'Turkish Habitation' in that city and of Turkish figures with their pipes are the first known examples of Middle Eastern subjects by the artist. On his return to England, Lewis developed a more sophisticated style in watercolour. His innovative technique immediately drew attention from contemporaries, the artist John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) among them. Indeed, an envious Cotman would later write: '... I saw above three hundred most splendid drawings by Lewis . . . words cannot convey to you their splendour. My poor Red Blues & Yellows for which I have in Norwich been so much abused and broken hearted about, are faded jades, to what I there saw'.²⁰

What Cotman and others were so enthusiastically responding to was Lewis's extensive use of pure white (called 'Chinese' white after its chemical perfection by Winsor & Newton in 1834) and bodycolour or gouache (watercolour mixed with white pigments), which, together with Lewis's miniaturist's style, gave to his pictures an opaqueness and a jewel-like brilliancy not typically associated with the medium. Anxious to explore the potential of this new technique and still searching for a genre that would demonstrate his talent as an observer of minutiae, Lewis travelled more widely in Britain and his paintings gained in narrative and personal complexity.

In 1832, Lewis left for Spain, following in the footsteps of his friend David Wilkie (1785–1841) and traveling at the same time as another colleague and close acquaintance, David Roberts (1796–1864). Unlike these artists, however, Lewis remained in Spain for two years, earning him the nickname 'Spanish' Lewis among his contemporaries in England. Wilkie, Roberts, and Lewis each produced enormously successful volumes of lithographs, as well as preliminary sketches for later, highly acclaimed paintings, based on their excursions abroad. From 1834 to 1839 all of Lewis's exhibited works were of Spanish subjects – an increasingly popular theme among artists and acquisitive Victorian audiences.

In 1834, after visiting Gibraltar and Tangiers, Lewis settled briefly in Paris. In the spring of 1838, after two more periods of residency in Paris in 1836 and during the winter of 1837, Lewis made his way to Italy. In October he reached Rome, where he would stay for nearly a year. Lewis executed only two major watercolours during this period, both of which focused on the elaborate Easter celebrations around St. Peter's Cathedral. These would be the last of Lewis's pictures to be seen in England for nearly a decade.

In July of 1840, Lewis embarked on an adventure less typical of the time, veering off the standard paths of other 19th-century travellers. He was in Corfu by the middle of that month and then proceeded on to Janina in Greece and to Albania. Apparently stricken with fever at the Gulf of Corinth, he managed to reach Smyrna (modern Izmir), Athens, and finally in mid-October the cosmopolitan city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), where he met his friend Wilkie. Newspapers picked up the story of the travellers' rendezvous a few months later. In December, a writer in the Art-Union suggested that Wilkie and Lewis 'make a good "division of the Turkish empire" between them.'²¹ The same newspaper later reported that Lewis had 'recently ordered a supply of drawing materials from England', and was therefore likely to remain in Constantinople for some time.²²

Lewis did in fact remain in that city, due in part to his continued poor health. In the spring of 1841, however, he was able to make a short excursion into Asia Minor. On 2 November 1841, Lewis sailed from Turkey to Alexandria. Shortly thereafter, he settled in Cairo, where he remained for nearly a decade. Curiosity as to why the artist would stay so long in Egypt soon gave way in London to frustration on the part of his former exhibiting venues – for months now deprived of works – and, eventually, to the fading of Lewis from popular memory.

In 1850, Lewis made a triumphant return to the London art world, first with the exhibition of his watercolour The Hareem and, soon after, his arrival home from Egypt. Professional accolades quickly restored him to his position of celebrity, though he again chose to remove himself from that city's social circles. Living in seclusion in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, with his beloved Marian, he executed Orientalist oil and watercolour paintings based on his years in Egypt. With no contemporary biographer, published diaries, or regular sightings in the streets or galleries, those interested in the artist turned to his paintings for information about his once and present life. For all their sparkling clarity, however, few answers were uncovered. Speculation led to mythology, with tales of a 'Lotus-eater' in Walton growing through the years.²³ Today, Lewis continues to attract widespread attention, and his paintings are eagerly sought after. Perhaps this is because we still believe that, somewhere in their myriad of details, we will find him there.

¹William Makepeace Thackeray [Michael Angelo Titmarsh, pseud.], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, London, 1846, pp. 282–91.
²Illustrated London News (25 March 1865), p. 285.
³The full title and details of this work are as follows: A Lady Receiving Visitors: The Apartment is the Mandarah, the Lower Floor of the House, Cairo (The Reception) (1873, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in. [63.5 x 76.2 cm], Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.417).
⁴For a detailed comparison of this painting with the watercolour version, see Emily M. Weeks, 'Oil and Water: (Re)Discovering John Frederick Lewis (1804–76)', Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 12.2 (Autumn 2013), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn13/new-discoveries-re-discovering-john-frederick-lewis-1804-76. For a full critical analysis of the oil painting, see Emily M. Weeks, Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and the Art of Orientalism, New Haven, CT and London, 2014, chapter 5 and passim.
⁵The line is similar to those seen on other 'extended' watercolours by Lewis, such as Courtyard of the Painter's House, Cairo (ca. 1850–51, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), comprised of five joined sheets of paper, and A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842 (1856, Yale Center for British Art), painted on three overlaid papers wrapped around a wooden board.
⁶See, for example, John Frederick Lewis to T. Griffith, 3 February 1858, Private Collection, Surrey, England.
⁷For additional details about the provenance and exhibition history of this watercolour, see Weeks, 'Oil and Water'.
⁸For Montagu's description of ladies of the harem receiving visitors, see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1763, ed., Roger Halsband, New York, 1971, 1:406.
⁹The full extent of Lewis's harem imagery cannot be documented here. See Weeks, Cultures Crossed, chapter 3 and passim for more.
¹⁰For a visual and literary summary of European attitudes toward women of the harem, see Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem 1800–1875, Madison and Teaneck, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002.
¹¹See, for example, Sophia Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, Written During a Residence There in 1842, 3 & 4 with E. W. Lane, 2 vols., London, 1844.
¹²Gazelles were also endowed with metaphorical connotations and often appeared in Arab poetry. The gazelle seen here was likely drawn by Lewis at London's zoological park or at a local menagerie.
¹³Details such as this were exhaustively explained in Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written by Edward William Lane (1801-1876) and originally published in London in 1836. Lane's text and illustrations were enormously popular among British audiences and became an indispensable resource for Orientalist artists, as well.
¹⁴For more on this incident and its aftermath, see Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppression, 1840–1890, Princeton, 1982, pp. 168–71. It should be mentioned that Turkish administrators resented the intervention of European diplomats in this matter, and that no significant policy changes resulted from Elliot's initiative.
¹⁵For a full discussion comparing contemporary British domestic arrangements and the trope of the 'angel in the house' with harem women, see Weeks, Cultures Crossed, chapter 5 and passim.
¹⁶'Women in the East', Bentley's Miscellany 27 (1850), p. 384.
¹⁷In addition to Lewis's own sketches of this rented Ottoman house, located in a traditional rather than 'Frank' (European) neighbourhood of Cairo, there are several architectural drawings made in the 1840s by James William Wild (1814-1892). These are now part of the Department of Prints & Drawings at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
¹⁸John Ruskin, Review of A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842 . . . , Academy Notes (1856) in John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London and New York, 1903–12, 14, pp. 73-8.
¹⁹For the most complete biography of Lewis to date, see Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. (1805-1876), Leigh-on-Sea, 1978. For Lewis's years in Egypt, see Weeks, Cultures Crossed.
²⁰John Sell Cotman to Dawson Turner, 8 January 1834, Private Collection, England.
²¹Art-Union 2 (December 1840), p. 194.
²²Art-Union 3 (March 1841), p. 49.
²³For a detailed analysis of the mythology that grew up around Lewis, see Weeks, Cultures Crossed, chapter 1 and passim.

We are grateful to Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D, for compiling this catalogue entry.