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All roads lead East

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient

Room 2 goes under the ugly title of ‘Genre and Gender’, the latter part of which really means pictures of girls, whether nude slaves by Gerome or the extraordinary skin tone of Holman Hunt’s ‘The Afterglow’, a beauty marred only by the tattoo on her chin. (Surely a fashion due for revival?) Compare the strangely disproportionate heads (too large) to bodies in Hunt’s Cairo street scene. Here too is a busy composition by that master of Eastern Promise, John Frederick Lewis (1804–76). ‘The Seraff — A Doubtful Coin’ is exotic in colour as well as content, with no cat (a Lewis trademark) but a donkey instead. Dadd appears again to very good advantage, with a portrait of a seated man, bearing a striking resemblance to the late lamented Dr David Brown, former Tate curator and art collector extraordinaire, and the delicately traced ‘Fantasie Egyptienne’ (1865). Then there are three pages from Dadd’s Middle Eastern sketchbook, showing in pencil studies of heads and figures what a power of line he could command.

In this room there are also a couple of attractive small paintings of courtyards by Lord Leighton and two remarkable watercolours by J.F. Lewis, who proves himself rather the hero of the exhibition. One is called ‘A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai’ and depicts the European traveller surrounded by the game he has slaughtered, portrayed in a cruel, hazy light; the other is ‘Interior of a School, Cairo’, in which a large and affronted cat eyes up a dove in the light from a latticed window. Holman Hunt also comes out well. In the next room, devoted to The Holy City, his famous ‘Scapegoat’ is hung next to his immaculately pieced and plotted landscape of terraces, ‘Bethlehem from the North’. There are a number of beautiful Lewis architectural studies in this room, but they don’t stir the heart like his ‘Commentator on the Koran’ does — another cat painting, with a hidden kitten greedily watching sparrows. There’s a treatise waiting to be written on the symbolism of cats in J.F. Lewis.