The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem by Gustav Bauernfeind

#18336: The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem by Gustav Bauernfeind
German, dated 1880
Canvas: Height 60cm, width 46cm, depth 1cm
Frame: Height 87cm, width 72cm, depth 10cm

This early oil on canvas by Gustav Bauernfeind shows the Dome of the Rock, painted in Munich from studies made on his first journey to Jerusalem.
The view is taken across a paved forecourt of irregular flagstones towards a broad flight of steps. At the top stands an arcade of four pointed arches on slender columns, one of the qanatir that crown the stairways to the raised platform of the Haram al-Sharif. Behind it rises the octagonal shrine with its tiled drum, and above it the dome in its ribbed lead covering, as it appeared until the 1960s, topped by a gilt crescent finial.
A single figure in white stands in the doorway beneath the arcade. On the left, tall trees cast shadow across the stones, and on the right a domed stone building with a shuttered window closes the composition.
The architecture is set out with an architect’s precision, each course of masonry and each step drawn in correct perspective. The tilework is picked out in blues and greens against the pale stone of the platform and steps.
The canvas is signed and dated lower left ‘G. Bauernfeind 1880’ and inscribed lower right ‘Jerusalem’. It is presented in a carved giltwood frame with laurel and acanthus mouldings.
Views of Jerusalem, Jaffa and Damascus form the core of Gustav Bauernfeind’s work. Born in Sulz am Neckar in 1848, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic School in Stuttgart and worked in the practice of Adolf Gnauth, with whose support he travelled to Italy in 1873 and turned to oil painting. In April 1880 he left for Beirut, where his sister Emilie lived with her husband, the missionary Wilhelm Staiger, and travelled on through Palestine and Syria. He returned to the region several times, working up his sketches and watercolours into finished oils in his Munich studio, many of them sold to England and America. In 1896 he moved to Palestine with his wife and son and settled in Jerusalem, where he died in 1904. The present painting, known as ‘Jerusalem, a View of the Mosque of Omar’, uses the name commonly given to the Dome of the Rock in the 19th century. It was painted in Munich after his return from that first journey, and the watercolour he made on site to fix its colours is now in the Gustav Bauernfeind Museum in Sulz am Neckar. A smaller oil on panel of the same site, ‘At the Dome of the Rock and the Fountain of Qayt Bay, Jerusalem’, signed and dated ‘G. Bauernfeind M 95’ and likewise inscribed ‘Jerusalem’ at the lower right, was offered at Sotheby’s in February 2024. Among the first views of Jerusalem he painted, the canvas records the shrine as it stood in 1880 and opens the series of Jerusalem subjects that would occupy him for the rest of his life.
$525,000