John Frederick Lewis (1805 - 1876)

John Frederick Lewis was perhaps the most gifted of English artists to paint in the East, with an almost obsessive precision and wealth of detail. His watercolour and gouache entitled The Hhareem created a sensation when it was exhibited in London in 1850. But despite the comment of the influential French critic Théophile Gautier that it was a combination of "Chinese patience and Persian delicacy," his work was little known outside his own country. Lewis, a club-man and a dandy in his youth, handsome and rather aloof, was selfcontained and completely dedicated to his art. Unlike many of his contemporary artisttravellers, he did not write enthusiastic and full accounts of his journeys in diaries or letters. Even the reason for his self-imposed isolation from European civilisation — he stayed in the Near East for eleven years — has never fully been explained. Lewis achieved recognition as a distinguished draughtsman and animal painter before he was twenty. He came from a family of artists and had received training from his father, Frederick Christian Lewis, Senior, a talented engraver.

He began to work almost exclusively in watercolour from about 1827. His first journey, to Spain and Tangiers, from 1832 to 1834, marked an important step in his career. It introduced him to Islamic architecture, changed his palette (he began to use washes of almost pure red, yellow and blue) and established his reputation. During the 1830s, he was nicknamed "Spanish" Lewis. In 1840, he sailed eastwards via Greece and Smyrna to Constantinople, where he drew numerous and impressive studies of mosques and the varied people found in the Ottoman Empire: Turks, Circassians, Armenians, Albanians. In the summer of 1841, he visited Bursa and later in the year, left for Egypt.

In Cairo, Lewis adopted Eastern clothes and lived as an Ottoman nobleman in a house in the Ezbekiyah quarter. He avoided the European community, saying that he enjoyed his life "because he was away from evening parties; he need not wear white kid gloves, or starched neck clothes, or read a newspaper." During his ten years in Cairo, he made countless sketches of the mosques, the shadowy covered souks and slenderpillared courtyards, the jostling bustling crowds in the narrow streets, and the interiors of harems, the sunlight filtering through the moucharabies onto the gorgeously rich clothes of the women. He also painted portraits: Mehemet (Mohammed) Ali Pasha, viceroy of Egypt, the young sulky-looking Prince Iskander, Madame Linant de Bellefonds, wife of the French engineer, and Sir John Gardiner Wilkinson, the noted Egyptologist.Cairo in the 1840s was still a medieval town, before the establishment of the rail-link with Alexandria and the opening of the Suez canal brought a tide of European visitors. Even so, Lewis found Cairo too civilized, society chatter tedious and the occasional caller from England distracting. He liked nothing b ter than to ride in the desert "with solemn contemplation of the stars at night, as the camels we e picketed,' the fires and the pipes were lighted." In 1842, he made an expedition to the Sinai desert, St. Catherine's and Jebel Mousa. He also made several other trips outside Cairo, to Suez, Edfou, Thebes, and the cataracts at Aswan. Although he accurately recorded the temples, he made more of the groups of people and camels; his early training as an animalier allowed him to be brilliant at these animals, particularly hard to draw well.

When Lewis and his young wife, who was often his model, returned to England in 1851, they found that The Hhareem, his first exhibit with the Old Watercolour Society since 1841, had won rave reviews. His greatest champion, the writer and theorist John Ruskin, was terrified, however, that Lewis's jewel-like watercolours would fade, and urged him to turn to oils. Although Lewis followed this advice, he probably did so more from financial than artistic considerations. He was certainly one of the most accomplished known users of the difficult medium of watercolour, and although he taught painting, his pupils found his high standards impossible to emulate. Lewis resigned as president and a member of the Old Watercolour Society in 1858, but regularly exhibited his oils, always of Eastern subjects, at the Royal Academy. These oil paintings were often versions of earlier watercolours. Important examples of Lewis's works have been shown in recent exhibitions, notably at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and The Fine Art Society in London. Others can be seen in museum collections, including those of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery (London), the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), the City Art Gallery (Manchester), the City Art Gallery (Birmingham), the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh), the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin), the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) and The Metropolitan Museum (New York).

Literature: Major-General M. Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978.

GALLERY PAGE OF JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS