A shepherd will guide you to Mecca
Sotheby’s sale “19th-Century European Art including The Orientalist” coming up in New York on October 23 has all the usual suspects among the European painters who fuelled European imaginations about what the Middle East was like in the 19th century.
A Courbet seaside and interior, a Delacroix sketch, some Corot landscapes and many other fine works are up for auction along with some almighty trash, like Carl Reichert and Émile Munier’s patented kitsch.
Bouguereau, Godward and Gerome are there too, with the last bringing along a vast panoply of his “Arabia or Bust” colleagues exotifying the souks and veiled dancers, and look at some of the prices! Fred Ross and the boys at the Art Renewal Center, where these artists are housed in plush surroundings, fed grapes by their devotees, must be rubbing their hands with glee.
Best of the bunch, I think, is the one above, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Le Barde Noir”, which Dr Emily M Weeks says in the auction catalogue is “one of only two works not in a prominent museum collection”. The Athenaeum, the London literary magazine, was knocked out by the composition, she adds, noting “the famously saturated colours, the seemingly impossible level of detail”.
The shrouded figure has been identified as “a Nubian musician” because of his East African bowl lyre, Weeks writes, but is likely a model Gérôme hired in Paris, “long after his Middle Eastern travels were over”.
The sword and slippers were perhaps already in the studio, since they reappear in many of his other paintings, and she thinks the tiled wall was rendered from a photograph (in inaccurate colours), while the carpet “seems a product of the artist’s imagination”.
No one cared; his work was by then in many wealthy homes, particularly in Britain, where he had moved in 1870 during the siege of Paris and remained for a year, using a studio at 17 Southampton Street in London, often employing expatriate Italians as models, and there began his series of Turkish bath paintings.
Made an honorary member of the Royal Academy, Gérôme continued sending pictures there for exhibition even after his return to France, including “Le Barde Noir” in about 1888. It wasn’t displayed in Paris until four years later.
The asking price for “Le Barde Noir” this month: $700,000 to $1 million — unframed.
William Bouguereau’s “Jeune Bergère Debout”, from 1887, should have no problem getting close to or even topping the expected $2.5 million flagged in the catalogue, which prattles on about Bouguereau’s “uncanny skill for depicting the human figure” and then goes stratospheric about how the humble shepherdess embodies “the spirit of the Enlightenment”.
“Nature exalted … peasants portrayed in monumental scale … the endless capabilities of the individual … Thomas Jefferson … individual rights …” Okay, okay, here’s the money! Just shut up!
Also darned good in the context of a mixed-mediocre menu is “The Venerated Elder” by Austrian Rudolf Ernst (1854-1932), yours for maybe $800,000. Here the catalogue notes (again by Dr Weeks) acknowledge a spotty career, but say this painting is one of his “most compelling” thanks to a sensitive portrayal of “filial piety” and deference to the aged that “shifts our attention from the mechanics of the painted surface to something more profound”.
“The respectful comportment of the Elder’s dignified companion is here particularly apt,” Weeks writes, “due to the additional duty that he performs. The Qur’an, temporarily removed from the inlaid wooden box on the left, is cradled in his arms, in appropriately elevated fashion … Ready for the Friday prayer — or perhaps already having completed it — the two men walk slowly through the mosque, a truly noble pair.”
