‘The Algerian’, an Orientalist Oil Painting by Stefano Ussi

#18215: ‘The Algerian’, an Orientalist Oil Painting by Stefano Ussi
Italian, 1876
Panel: height 36cm, width 22cm, depth 1cm
Frame: height 52cm, width 37cm, depth 5cm

This golden-toned oil on panel by the Florentine painter Stefano Ussi shows a bearded guard standing watch in profile before a sunlit wall, staff in hand. It belongs to the single North African figure studies that Ussi worked up into finished cabinet pictures in the years following his travels to Egypt and Morocco, drawing on the sketches he had made abroad.
The guard wears a yellow-and-red striped headcloth bound with a dark cord, its knotted fringe falling across the chest, over a deep crimson robe caught at the waist with a green sash, with leather sandals on his feet. One hand rests against his breast and the other is closed around a tall staff.
Behind him an arcade of arched recesses recedes into shadow, one opening framing a distant glimpse of blue sky, a slender column and green foliage. The saturated reds and yellows of the costume are set against the pale, broadly brushed masonry, and the fall of light is recorded across the folds of the robe and the textures of cloth, skin and stone.
The panel is signed, inscribed and dated at the lower left, the inscription probably reading 'L'algerino / Stefano / Ussi 1876'. It is presented in a carved giltwood frame bearing a plaque inscribed 'S. Ussi'.
Stefano Ussi (1822–1901) trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence under Enrico Pollastrini and was known first as a history painter, above all for 'The Expulsion of the Duke of Athens' (Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence). The painting was shown at the first Esposizione Nazionale in Florence in 1861 and awarded a prize in Paris in 1867. Ussi travelled to Egypt in 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal and again in 1872 at the invitation of the Khedive. In 1875 he joined an Italian diplomatic mission to Morocco with the painter Cesare Biseo and the writer Edmondo De Amicis, whose account of the journey, 'Marocco', Ussi and Biseo later illustrated.
A closely related panel by Ussi, 'A Moroccan Guard', was sold at Sotheby's, London, in The Orientalist Sale on 29 March 2022. Almost identical in support, format and framed dimensions, and likewise depicting a single standing North African figure, it appears to belong to the same series of cabinet-sized studies.
$18,000