Orientalist Oil Painting of a Cairo Street Scene by James Bertrand

18192: Orientalist Oil Painting of a Cairo Street Scene by James Bertrand
By Bertrand, Jean-Baptiste (French, 1823–1887)
French, dated 1878
Canvas: height 62cm, width 84cm, depth 2cm
Frame: height 98cm, width 119cm, depth 10cm
This Orientalist scene by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Bertrand, known as James Bertrand, shows a busy street in a North African town, most probably Cairo, beneath a wide luminous sky. Across a broad sunlit space the life of the quarter unfolds in a sequence of closely observed vignettes. At the left a train of laden camels and travelling figures presses in from a side street, one rider shaded beneath a parasol, while in the foreground a barefoot water-seller in a blue robe and red turban stands with his staff and vessels, a seated child in white watching from beside a tall wicker cage.
To the right, orange-sellers set out their fruit in wicker baskets before a raised stone terrace, where a group of men sit smoking and talking in the shade of a wooden awning, in the manner of a street café. In the right foreground two turbaned men rest among flowering shrubs, one drawing on a long pipe, their exchange set against the bustle beyond. The houses are recorded with attention to their flat roofs, shuttered windows and projecting mashrabiya balconies, the warm ochres and creams of the sunlit walls answered by cooler passages of shadow. Above them a tall minaret banded in pink and white rises against the sky, anchoring the composition and lending the scene a Cairene character.
Views of this kind met a strong nineteenth-century appetite for scenes of daily life in the cities of the Near East and North Africa. Cairo in particular, with its markets, mosques and crowded streets, drew European painters in growing numbers, and finished street scenes of this type were sought by Salon audiences and collectors, valued both for their subject matter and for the precision with which architecture, costume and incident were set down.
Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon under Claude Bonnefond and afterwards in Paris, Bertrand exhibited at the Salon from 1857 and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1876. He spent the years around 1857 to 1862 in Italy, where he formed friendships with the sculptors Carpeaux, Falguière and Clésinger, an association often linked to the more solidly modelled forms and stronger colour of his later work. He is best remembered for his allegories and for a series of historical and literary heroines, which makes this densely peopled Orientalist street scene a comparatively uncommon subject within his output. The painting is executed in oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left, 'James Bertrand / 1878', and is presented in a giltwood frame.
$37,500