Light on the harem

John Frederick Lewis was intoxicated by the life in Cairo. So much so, he was still painting it 20 years on from his Surrey studio. Mark Hudson sheds light on the artist's tour-de-force watercolour which is not all it seems ...

The shadows of lattice screens bathe walls, marble floors and the bodies of sumptuously attired figures. These are surfaces designed to allow observation of the street outside, while keeping the interior of the house, specifically its female inhabitants, free from prying eyes behind an inscrutable facade.

In this image however we’re on the other side of the lattice, freely observing the unveiled inhabitants of the harem. Far from being gloomily mysterious or stacked with exotic clutter as you might expect, the spaces are lofty and airy. The lady of the house lies sprawled in magisterial ease as a group of female visitors, including a very young girl, eye her a shade nervously from the other side of an ornamental pool. The scene is captured in a range of masterfully balanced colours, cadmium red, teal blue, orange and green, watercolour mixed with Chinese white so the hues take on a jewel-like, irradiating glow. 

There are two versions of this work by the celebrated English orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis. The oil painting in the Yale Centre for British Art is tinged with the golden glow we’d expect of a Victorian view of the East.

But it’s the slightly larger watercolour offered in Bonhams' 19th Century and Orientalist Paintings Sale that has the greater sense of light and life. At 41 inches wide (large for a watercolour), it’s a technical tour-de-force achieving a richness of colour and texture that belies everything we expect of this most quintessentially English of mediums.

Lewis (1804-1872) spent ten years in the Egyptian capital, embedding himself in the local culture, with an existence described by the visiting English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray as “dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied”. When he grew weary of foreign visitors and invitations to embassy cocktail parties, Lewis would ride out into the desert and contemplate the stars.

“When he grew weary of foreign visitors and invitations to embassy cocktail parties, Lewis would ride out into the desert and contemplate the stars”

Yet this painting’s unprecedentedly informal glimpse into the real world of the harem – then a place of intense and often prurient speculation for Europeans– was created not in Cairo, but in Lewis’s studio in Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, 22 years after his last visit to Egypt. The central figure of the chatelaine was conjured not from drawings made in situ or even from memory, but with his wife Marian, 20 years his junior, as model.

Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the term has become increasingly embattled: synonymous not only with romantically inclined 19^th century European painters, but with almost any manifestation of an exoticising – and from Said’s perspective implicitly colonialist – western gaze. It’s problematic, of course, to make sweeping generalisations about a phenomenon that involved artists of the calibre of Delacroix at one end of the timescale and Matisse at the other. But even by the standards of the varied band of eccentrics and opportunists who made up the core of the orientalist wave – lured to the Near East by the promise of heightened colour and primal human drama – John Frederick Lewis stands out as a singular figure. And that isn’t primarily for his much commented upon adoption of an 'oriental' lifestyle – relaxing in eastern garb was almost as popular in Kensington as it was in Cairo judging by photographs of Lord Leighton’s Holland Park house. Rather Lewis projected himself and his personal circumstances into his work in an imaginative, quasi-fictional examination of his own identity, in paintings in which he went far further than almost any of his contemporaries in attempting to fuse eastern and western forms. It’s a propensity that is very evident in A Reception in the Harem.  

“Relaxing in eastern garb was almost as popular in Kensington as it was in Cairo”

Born in London in 1804, into a family of artists, Lewis enjoyed a successful and relatively conventional career trajectory, including presidency of the Old Watercolour Society and membership of the Royal Academy. Drawn to travel early in his career, he had already spent time drawing in Spain and Morocco – becoming known for a time as 'Spanish Lewis' – before he set out on the great adventure of his life in 1837. After voyaging in Italy, Greece and Turkey, he arrived in Cairo in 1841 for what was to become the most sustained period spent by any British artist in the then Ottoman Empire.

While there has been speculation as to why Lewis chose to site this all-female scene in a space traditionally reserved for men, this room had over the 20 years since he had last set foot in it, become a place of hallucinatory resonance for him.

Yet Lewis’s Cairo house, a rented Mamluk mansion, wasn’t the only Egyptian location that was to haunt Lewis from a distance. In many of his later paintings, a distinctive white-bearded, white-turbaned figure can be seen in varied roles: as a bazaar money lender called upon to judge the fairness of a transaction in The Doubtful Coin, as a holy man reading the Koran to a sick woman in And the Prayer of Faith shall Save the Sick, and as a somnolent carpet seller in The Bezestein Al Khan Khalil, Cairo.

While this recurring figure doesn’t seem to have been remarked upon by his contemporaries, he is now understood to represent Lewis himself. Having been intoxicated by the colour and otherness of Cairo’s teeming lanes on his arrival in the city, he now projected himself into that remembered territory as a cultural insider, a figure indeed of authority. In one painting he is even seen at prayer in a mosque.

The use of pictorial space in A Reception in the Harem is at first sight conventionally European, with the employment of perspective creating a sense of box-like recession that allows us to feel we are entering the scene. The colours on the other hand have far greater chromatic intensity than most British paintings of the time. While the merging of these colours in the neutral areas to create a textural richness to rival oil paint feels again very European, the fact that the intricately patterned screens and stained glass are for the most part parallel to the picture plane, and seen full-on, allows them to become part of the structure of the paining, and indeed part of the drama, as they would be in a Middle Eastern miniature painting or in one of the many Matisse works that were inspired by them.

The painting’s visual, spatial and apparent cultural ambiguities extend into its human and narrative content, upon which scholars have placed many interpretations. Was the scene conjured essentially from memory? Or did Lewis, more probably, never set foot in the women’s quarters of a Muslim house? Does the painting’s serene rectilinear structure imply approval of a conservative social order, in which women are seen as inherently dangerous to men? Or does the removal of this all female scene into the male quarters of the house – the mandara – imply a disruption of that order, and by extension a comment on the the circumscribed position of women in Victorian Britain?

“The painting’s cast of characters speaks far more of Walton-on-Thames than of Cairo”

Purely physiognomically, the painting’s cast of characters speaks far more of Walton-on-Thames than of Cairo. Are we looking in on an innocuous social call or is the young girl being presented to the harem – an occurrence seen in a number of Lewis’s other paintings?

Contemporaries were so dazzled by the painting's hyperreal evocation of light and space there was speculation he had used a stereoscope, an optical device then in vogue, in creating it. Whatever the facts of that conjecture, it will be some time, I dare say, before this technically extraordinary, yet enigmatic painting fully gives up its secrets.  

Mark Hudson is Art Critic of The Independent.

19th Century & Orientalist Paintings | New Bond Street, London | 26 March 2025

For enquiries, contact Charles O'Brien on Charles.Obrien@bonhams.com or +44 20 7468 8360