The narghile Smoker

Rudolf Ernst, born in Vienna in 1854, was the son of the architectural painter Leopold Ernst. After attending the Vienna Academy in 1869 and exhibiting in Munich he travelled to Italy in 1874. As early as 1876 Ernst decided to settle in Paris where he would exhibit at the Salon des Artistes Français for the following six decades. Like his close friend Ludwig Deutsch, who also took French nationality, Ernst belongs to the second generation of Orientalist painters. The first generation such as Horace Vernet, Alexandre Colin and Eugéne Delacroix were of the romantic strain and inspired by political events such Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, the Greek War of independence, and France's conquest of Algeria under Charles X. Artists from the second half of the century such as Jean-Léon Géréme, Gustave Bauernfeind, Ludwig Deutsch and Ernst were more interested in depicting scenes from the daily life of the East, as it was imagined then : caravans in the desert, fantasias, mosque interiors, palace guards, or leisurely activities - such as music or smoking narghiles.

As it is the case in all of Ernst paintings, as in those of his compatriot Ludwig Deutsch, the ensemble depicted here is composed of multiple borrowings, from the Ottoman furnishings to the blend of Iznick-style inspired tiles and Byzantine and Hispano-Moresque combination in the stone work. The Eastern motif is used by Ernst as a canvas on which he projects contemporary western fantasies about these mysterious oriental spaces. His realistic style, complete with the various props, carpets, fabrics and tiles that the artist brought back from his trips to North Africa and Turkey, lend the scene its prodigious sense of veracity which fascinated Western viewers at the time and contributed to Ernst's international success as one of the most gifted Orientalist painters of his generation.