Important Notice

Edwin Lord Weeks was the most celebrated American Orientalist painter in the Paris expatriate community of academic artists during the late 19th century. He was known for his remarkable artistic talent that was enriched by an intrepid sense of adventure. Born to an affluent family of spice and tea merchants in Boston in 1849, he developed an interest in art and travel at an early age. His career as a painter of Orientalist themes began in 1872,... Edwin Lord Weeks was the most celebrated American Orientalist painter in the Paris expatriate community of academic artists during the late 19th century. He was known for his remarkable artistic talent that was enriched by an intrepid sense of adventure. Born to an affluent family of spice and tea merchants in Boston in 1849, he developed an interest in art and travel at an early age. His career as a painter of Orientalist themes began in 1872, the year of his first transatlantic voyage. Some of his earliest watercolours date back to this journey, which included stops in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Weeks extensively explored Northern Africa and the Middle East between the 1870s and 1890s and travelled across Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Persia, and India. He specialised in figurative works and desert landscapes inspired by sights he witnessed on these journeys.

His paintings of Egypt and Morocco quickly gained acclaim in France and America, favoured “not only for their artistic merits but also ‘because of their faithful representations of the life and habits of a country into which but few travelers penetrate.’” (Ulrich W Hiesinger, Edwin Lord Weeks: Visions of India, New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art Inc., 2002, p. 21) Moroccan Camel Driver at Tangier was the artist’s first work to be accepted at the Paris Salon in 1878. Though little-known at the time, he became a favourite at subsequent Salon galleries and participated in several official committees. The present lot is one of two paintings that he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1884 under the title Un Sanctuaire Hindou, á Bombay (A Hindu Temple in Bombay). This was the first time that he debuted his Indian subjects at the exhibition, which paved the way for him to eventually earn the Légion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit in 1896..

According to Alexander Twombly, though harrowing, Weeks’ journey to Rabat on the coast of Morocco in 1878 marked the beginning of his maturity as an artist. “However, it was the artist’s subsequent choice of India as the arena for his work that capped his success, reflecting both the novelty of the subject and the extraordinary treatment it received in his hands.” (Hiesinger, p. 10) Weeks had long been drawn to the East and closely studied French traveller Louis Rousselet’s expansive, 800-page travel book India and its Native Princes: Travels in Central India and in the Presidencies of Bombay and Bengal, published in 1875. He made three trips to India-in 1882-83, 1886-87, and 1892–93-visiting Lahore, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Benares, Jodhpur, Ahmedabad, and Bombay. He took photographs and made copious notes and studies throughout his travels, based on which he produced numerous sketches and oil paintings documenting the region’s architecture, lively street scenes, and vibrant culture.

The present lot most likely depicts a temple on the outskirts of Bombay. Monumental in scale, it is an outstanding example of Weeks’ remarkable academic skills of realistic draughtsmanship and naturalistic colour that set him apart from other American and European Orientalists. He developed these exceptional skills as a young man in the 1870s under the tutelage of Léon Bonnat, who had studied in Madrid and had been exposed to the European School’s brilliant use of colour. During this time, he adopted the practice of painting en plein air, which allowed him to master the nuances of natural light and shadow-a technique that would greatly shape his artistic style. A critic remarked in an 1880 review of Weeks’ work, “The art qualities in which Mr Weeks excels are light and colour. He has a passion for brilliant effects but renders them so skillfully that his pictures do not seem crude or sensational…He is in such direct sympathy with the oriental subjects he loves, that one would not imagine on looking at his pictures, that they were painted by one who was born and brought up under the cold skies, and amid the rigid social customs of New England.” (Hiesinger, p. 20)

The work bears several hallmarks of Weeks’ characteristic principles. It demonstrates his favoured compositional style-a diagonal perspective and a setting structured around a portal, often with steps, and highlighting a seemingly ordinary scene against an impressive backdrop. The saturated palette and play of the bright light of the sun and deep shadow captures the essence of the tropical atmosphere of Bombay. This careful handling of light expertly foregrounds a scene of a fakir addressing a group of women, which provides a narrative element to the painting.

The temple architecture in the backdrop lends the composition a sense of the picturesque. Weeks’ mastery of depicting textures naturalistically and with fine detail is clearly evident in the intricate carvings and ridges hewn into the stone. “The attention to architectural detail and the deep and genuine interest in Indian monuments it reveals is an enduring characteristic of Weeks both as an artist and as a writer. His exact and convincing architectural contexts contribute greatly to the believability of his scenes.” (Hiesinger, p. 36) The iconography on the walls of the temple suggest it is a Hindu one. This was an unusual subject for Weeks who usually favoured the Indo-Islamic structures of North India. Overall, the painting offers a sense of theatricality and a feeling of being transported to another time and place, sentiments that Weeks often referred to in his writings on India.

The work is all the more remarkable for its appearance of having been rendered en plein air. It is more likely a composite of sketches of individuals he had observed, vignettes of street scenes, and architectural studies that he made during his travels and built up at his studio in Paris at a later date. Memorialising Weeks’ storied legacy a critic from his hometown wrote, “Of all the Boston-born painters who have made a name for themselves in the European world of art, there is none whose reputation has been greater, whose honors have been more numerous, or whose work has been better known and esteemed…His paintings of the East are splendid descriptive pages, full of interesting detail, and glowing with brilliant color…Particularly luminous and spectacular are some of his pictures of the cities of India, with their wonderful architecture, so well drawn…Without being theatrical, these scenes are finely dramatic, and they are among the best illustrations of Oriental life that we have in color. The pageantry of Indian life appealed powerfully to the artist, and he rendered it with all its inherent splendor and gorgeousness.” (Hiesinger, p. 49)

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