An Orientalist Painting

Antinous in the form of Osiris, c1790-c1820

At the Fitzwilliam Museum there is a small exhibition entitled The Great Belzoni, occasioned by the donation of a portrait of Belzoni to the Fitzwilliam. The authorities have marked the occasion by setting up a small exhibition of items from the permanent collection that are linked in some way to Belzoni. “In some way” is a rather broad term, since the single room devoted to the exhibition includes a miscellany of paintings, drawings and objects loosely linked to Egypt in the 19th century – a rather broad area. However much (or little) Belzoni knew about ancient Egypt, and it seems unlikely he knew very much, given his career history as a circus strongman among other activities, he certainly participated in, and was perhaps partly responsible for, a mania for all things Egyptian and Oriental during the period. One example is the ludicrous small statue of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, depicted as the god Osiris. Although this porcelain statue is from Belzoni's time, it is derived from a Roman original. Clearly, the fashion for Orientalism - dressing up the everyday in the costumes of another civilization to make it more exotic - started well before the eighteenth-century in Europe.

I’m not complaining that the exhibition was a hotch-potch, because its loose nature has enabled some things from the permanent collection to be shown that would otherwise be left gathering dust. Most wonderfully, it reveals at least one magical work, John Frederick Lewis’s The Siesta. The Fitzwilliam has Lewis's first version, in watercolour.

Lewis, The Siesta (Fitzwilliam, c1876)

Lewis (1804-1876) was an English painter who lived in Cairo for ten years (as well as spells in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East). On his return to England, he used items collected from his stay abroad to suggest an Oriental theme in many of his paintings.  According to Wikipedia, he would often use his (British) wife as a model for the many ‘oriental’ works he painted for the rest of his career. His works often have exotic titles such as “The Harem”, but the figures depicted in many of them have faces more characteristic of Victorian drawing rooms.

In other words, what is “oriental” about his paintings (by "oriental" I mean exotic and sensuous for a Western viewer) above is largely anecdotal and imaginary: a state of mind rather than an accurate record. It could have been a room in Walton-on-Thames (where Lewis lived after his return to England). But in this painting, what is displayed is less about the figures and more about patterns and colours. In any case, the representations of objects and figures are less than detailed: the woman is wearing some kind of long green gown, but beyond that it would be difficult to be specific. The impression left in the viewer is of areas of varied and contrasting colours: the colours of the woman’s clothes and the fabrics on which she is reclining; the flowers on the table; the light shining through the translucent green gauze across the window; the light shining through the grille that seems to make up the outer wall of the space viewed; the patterned carpet. The rich juxtapositions of patterns, the grill that seems to make up the wall of the room, and the low kind of divan in one corner of the room, make up the exotic feel to the picture space. The woman asleep makes this a slightly voyeuristic act on the part of the viewer: we are accessing a private world. In a few words, this is exotic, reclining, relaxed, inviting, sensuous; a space we would like to inhabit. The painting is all the more successful because the human forms only a small part of the background of the painting; other works by Lewis have an exotic location but a main figure with an all-too obvious and everyday face. I prefer my fantasies more suggested than intrusive.

Lewis painted the same work again in oil (now in the Tate Britain).

Lewis, The Siesta (Oil version, Tate Britain)

However, I think the oil version is slightly more composed, and loses some of the exquisite freshness of the watercolour version. It also lacks some of the lovely pinks and blues of the watercolour.

Orientalist or not, The Siesta (in either version) is a magnificently evocative picture, and a match for (say) Tennyson in using a remote civilization as a vague suggestive backdrop to turn a mundane subject into a kind of dream: The Siesta is a wonderful example of the art of suggestion.