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Tuesday 2 December 2008

And Another Thing

Eye-stopping glimpses of an exotic and forbidden world

For another glimpse of this marvellous artist we must turn to Thackeray’s delightful travel book, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), where Lewis’s eccentric Oriental lifestyle in the grand Mamluk mansion he rented is described with charm and fun.

There are some fine landscapes in the show, notably by David Roberts, the number two British artist in this genre, but who concentrated, unlike Lewis, on buildings and grand masses, as became his training as a successful scene-painter. But there are some fine Lears, one of them (in a private collection), completely new to me. It shows Petra, painted in that brief period after the late-winter rains when the floor of the normally arid valley becomes a luxurious mass of bright green. It is a masterpiece and belies the conventional wisdom that Lear is never at his best in oils. There are some notable Holman Hunts too, not to everyone’s taste, though one should bear in mind that these painstaking works were done in conditions of great discomfort and sometimes of real danger. Personally I am deeply grateful to these gifted and courageous artists who took so much trouble, and so many risks, to give us faithful images of these places in the 19th century.

Although the French had many more artists specialising in the Muslim East at this time, there are none to match the British group in accuracy save Delacroix, and he only in his watercolour sketchbooks, which are outstanding, as opposed to his finished oils done in the studio. The French were much more critical of Muslim ethics than the British were: hence such horrifying and dramatic works as Henri Regnault’s 1870 masterpiece, ‘Execution Without Hearing under the Moorish Kings’, now raising goosepimples in the Musée d’Orsay. The French also liked to emphasise the nakedness and eroticism of the harem, led by Chasseriau, Lecomte du Nouy and, above all, Ingres. His ‘Turkish Bath’ (Louvre) always makes me laugh, but it is a luscious piece of scabrous nonsense, originally more shocking but cut down from a square to a circle to eliminate naughtier bits. Ingres was a great painter in the sense that he knew how to grab the attention by the power of his images, and hold it by his superb technique.

There was no excuse, other than sales, for such an imaginative presentation of Muslim life. In 1860, for instance, an accurate and matter-of-fact book was published in Europe, written by the widow of a Turkish pasha, and entitled Twenty Years in a Harem. Such a work could not possibly be published today, given the ferocity of our creeping censorship.

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