Afternoon Tea

Depicting a lady taking tea and her servant in an imagined Orient, this composition follows an artistic template which Ernst varied frequently, alternating settings and props to create different effects. The rose-covered portico and the garden evening setting, for example, both recur frequently in his oeuvre, and are designed to convey a sense of languid indolence. Other characteristics include the artist's preoccupation with surface texture and, above all, with bright colours -- pink, turquoise and purple -- designed to heighten the sense of the exotic.

Most of the objects Ernst includes in his paintings are from his own personal collection. Similarly to Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ludwig Deutsch, with whom he was close friends, Ernst had gathered a sizeable group of artefacts from the Middle East, including ceramic tiles, lamps, pottery, silk, satins and kaftans, from his travels to Moorish Spain, Morocco, Tunis and Istanbul during the 1880s.