John Frederick Lewis
Detailed, respectful Orientalist realism
John Frederick Lewis was an English Orientalist painter. He specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes in detailed watercolour or oils, very often repeating the same composition in a version in each medium. He lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, and after his return to England in 1851 he specialized in highly detailed works showing both realistic genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealized scenes in upper class Egyptian interiors with little apparent Western influence. His very careful and loving representation of Islamic architecture, furnishings, screens, and costumes set new standards of realism, which influenced other artists, including the leading French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in his later works. Unlike many other Orientalist painters who took a salacious interest in the women of the Middle East, he "never painted a nude", and his wife modelled for several of his harem scenes. These, with the rare examples by the classicist painter Lord Leighton, imagine "the harem as a place of almost English domesticity, ... [where]... women's fully clothed respectability suggests a moral healthiness to go with their natural good looks".
Relationship Network
Master student
- John Richard Coke Smyth Student
Influenced
Artworks by this artist (72 total)
- Highland Hospitality 1832
- And The Prayer Of Faith Shall Save The Sick
- Spanish Peasants Dancing the Bolero 1836
- Study Of A Man Wearing North African Dress
- A Spanish woman
- A Street Scene in Granada on the Day of the Bullfight 1833
- The Hypaethral Temple At Philae, Upper Egypt
- Two Horses
- Portrait of General Jochmus Pasha, circa 1841
- Sketch for In the Bezestein, El Khan Khalil, Cairo
- Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra. London 1835
- Walton-On-Thames A Study Of A Greek Man 1828
- Seated Turk
- Head of a Young Woman between 1838 and 1840
- Interior of the Great Mosque, (Ulucami) Bursa, Turkey
- The Bezestein Bazaar, El Khan Khalil, Cairo 1843-44
- The Temple of Edfu; The Door of the Pylon 1850
- An Interior with Armor and Weaponry
- Harriet Ford’s maid 1833
- Portrait study of an Italian peasant girl