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Lot Essay
Spanning more than three metres in width, Palm Tree and Camel is a dazzling example of Rose Wylie’s witty narrative paintings. Painted in 2012, it belongs to a trio of canvases centred on the story of the Queen of Sheba, inspired by a 14th-century miniature that the artist discovered in a book about fairy tales. Here, Wylie depicts what she describes as ‘props’ in the tale: palm trees, a camel, scuttling scorpions and a rudimentary map of Ethiopia, set against a luminous swathe of gold. With its electrifying palette, raw textual inscriptions and gestural brushwork—hallmarks of the artist’s style—the work was unveiled in her BP Spotlight presentation at Tate Britain, London in 2013. Much like the Queen of Sheba herself, the show marked Wylie’s grand arrival after decades of art-making, fuelling a surge of critical acclaim that culminated in her major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, earlier this year.
Wylie’s eclectic visual imagination roams freely. Drawing upon a vast mental archive, as well as the reams of source material that litter her studio floor, she plunders art history, film, fashion photography and magazine advertisements. Long fascinated by the ancient world, Wylie’s dalliance with the story of the Queen of Sheba was prompted by Marina Warner’s 1994 book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. As Clarrie Wallis notes, she was also inspired by a new tin of emerald green paint, which glows brightly across the three works (Rose Wylie, London, 2022, p. 66). In the Bible’s version of the story, the Queen of Sheba arrives in Jerusalem to test King Solomon’s wisdom, accompanied by ‘camels that bore spices, and very much gold’ (I Kings 10:2). The present work seems to depict this moment, charting her journey from Africa. The word ‘lump’ relates to another work in the series, Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump, which depicts her with a stack of gleaming precious metal.
Later retellings embellished the Queen of Sheba’s story further. Wylie relates the version she knew. ‘Solomon sent the djinns out to research whether the Queen of Sheba was as beautiful, as wise and whether she was, rather importantly, as rich as he’d heard she was. And they came back and they said, she is excessively beautiful, she’s hugely rich and she’s very wise but she has cloven feet. As the Queen of Sheba approached Solomon’s palace, there was a little river and they took the bridge away so that she would have to take her shoes off and lift her skirt up so they could see whether she had cloven feet’ (quoted in ‘Rose Wylie—“I Like Big Work”’, TateShots, 2013). This surreal twist, along with its potential for feminist retelling, spoke directly to Wylie’s own aesthetic agenda, which rails against outmoded notions of beauty and delights in subverting patriarchal narratives. Here, the artist confronts an ancient, slippery tale with bold humour and visual theatrics, subsuming it into her own unmistakable pantheon.
Wylie’s eclectic visual imagination roams freely. Drawing upon a vast mental archive, as well as the reams of source material that litter her studio floor, she plunders art history, film, fashion photography and magazine advertisements. Long fascinated by the ancient world, Wylie’s dalliance with the story of the Queen of Sheba was prompted by Marina Warner’s 1994 book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. As Clarrie Wallis notes, she was also inspired by a new tin of emerald green paint, which glows brightly across the three works (Rose Wylie, London, 2022, p. 66). In the Bible’s version of the story, the Queen of Sheba arrives in Jerusalem to test King Solomon’s wisdom, accompanied by ‘camels that bore spices, and very much gold’ (I Kings 10:2). The present work seems to depict this moment, charting her journey from Africa. The word ‘lump’ relates to another work in the series, Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump, which depicts her with a stack of gleaming precious metal.
Later retellings embellished the Queen of Sheba’s story further. Wylie relates the version she knew. ‘Solomon sent the djinns out to research whether the Queen of Sheba was as beautiful, as wise and whether she was, rather importantly, as rich as he’d heard she was. And they came back and they said, she is excessively beautiful, she’s hugely rich and she’s very wise but she has cloven feet. As the Queen of Sheba approached Solomon’s palace, there was a little river and they took the bridge away so that she would have to take her shoes off and lift her skirt up so they could see whether she had cloven feet’ (quoted in ‘Rose Wylie—“I Like Big Work”’, TateShots, 2013). This surreal twist, along with its potential for feminist retelling, spoke directly to Wylie’s own aesthetic agenda, which rails against outmoded notions of beauty and delights in subverting patriarchal narratives. Here, the artist confronts an ancient, slippery tale with bold humour and visual theatrics, subsuming it into her own unmistakable pantheon.