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Lot Essay
Lewis had travelled to Turkey via Greece in October 1840: his arrival in Istanbul was recorded by his fellow artist, David Wilkie, who wrote to his brother: 'We have encountered John Lewis - from Greece and Smyrna. He is making numbers of drawings'. The following day Wilkie reported in another letter, 'He has been making most clever drawings, as usual'. Both artists lodged at the 'Casa di Giuseppina', whose Greek landlady was 'a celebrated beauty', and whom Wilkie, and perhaps Lewis, sketched. At some point in 1841, Lewis made a trip to Bursa (then called 'Brussa' or 'Broussa') where he made some exceptionally fine drawings of both local people and the principal Islamic monuments - the Yesil Tribe and the Ulu Cami. As Briony Llewellyn has noted, chief among Lewis’s reasons for travelling to the Near East in 1840 following time in Spain, Italy and Greece, was ‘a desire for novelty, a need to infuse his art with exotic and colourful subjects that represented a culture other than European.’ (B. Llewellyn, ‘David Wilkie and John Frederick Lewis in Constantinople, 1840: an artistic dialogue’, The Burlington Magazine, no. 1206, vol. 145, September 2003, pp. 629-630).
The woman depicted in this drawing is not veiled, suggesting that she was not Muslim but rather a Christian of an Eastern denomination, probably from an Armenian merchant family in Bursa. It seems likely that, during his stay in Bursa, Lewis gained access to the home of a wealthy local Armenian family, to judge from the handful of drawings he produced of female members of the same family in the interior of what appears to be their home. The same beautiful young woman, for example, is seen at the left of a larger, finished watercolour by Lewis depicting four women in an interior, also signed and dated ‘Brussa 1841’, sold in these Rooms 15 June 2010, lot 10 (fig. 1). The same model also appears in another of Lewis’s Bursa drawings of 1841; a study of two women today in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester, of which a second version was sold in these Rooms 12 June 2012, lot 70. A larger, unsigned autograph replica of the present sheet is in the collection of the British Museum (1953,1211.11).
Carl Winter (1906-1966) was Assistant Keeper and then Deputy Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1931 and 1946, when he moved to become Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.
The woman depicted in this drawing is not veiled, suggesting that she was not Muslim but rather a Christian of an Eastern denomination, probably from an Armenian merchant family in Bursa. It seems likely that, during his stay in Bursa, Lewis gained access to the home of a wealthy local Armenian family, to judge from the handful of drawings he produced of female members of the same family in the interior of what appears to be their home. The same beautiful young woman, for example, is seen at the left of a larger, finished watercolour by Lewis depicting four women in an interior, also signed and dated ‘Brussa 1841’, sold in these Rooms 15 June 2010, lot 10 (fig. 1). The same model also appears in another of Lewis’s Bursa drawings of 1841; a study of two women today in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester, of which a second version was sold in these Rooms 12 June 2012, lot 70. A larger, unsigned autograph replica of the present sheet is in the collection of the British Museum (1953,1211.11).
Carl Winter (1906-1966) was Assistant Keeper and then Deputy Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1931 and 1946, when he moved to become Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.