Moor in white, squatting (Moor at prayer, mosque in Cordoba, Spain)

Details

Edwin Lord Weeks (American, 1849-1903)
Moor in white, squatting (Moor at prayer, mosque in Cordoba, Spain)
oil on canvas
16½ x 11¾ in. (42 x 30 cm.)
Painted in the late 1870s.

Provenance

Artist's estate sale; American Art Galleries, New York, 15-17 March 1905, no. 147 (sold for $32.50).
By descent through the family of John D. Bates, Boston.
with Borghi & Co., New York.

Literature

G.M. Ackerman, American Orientalists, Paris, 1994, p. 246 (illustrated).

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

This painting, executed in Cordoba or Morocco in the late 1870s, bears all the hallmarks of Weeks's on-the-spot figure paintings. The brushwork is highly spontaneous and only the carefully rendered surface textures of the Moor's arm and face bear signs of having been later reworked.

Weeks frequently re-used studies made in situ in his finished studio works. The figure in the present painting is included in one of Weeks's most important canvases, The Interior of the Mosque at Cordoba (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore), where he is shown at prayer .

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