After a decade of living and working in Cairo, John Frederick Lewis returned to London in 1851. He established himself as the preeminent interpreter of life in the East, painting genre scenes that played upon Western notions of Oriental luxury set amid bazaars, harems, desert landscapes, and mosques. He rendered each of these subjects in a style characterized by one contemporary critic as “marvelous in minute manipulation” (“Art Journal”, 1876, p. 176).

   Lewis's sharp style blurs boundaries in this meeting between East and West. A local term for anything European, the Frank of the Frank Encampment was Frederick William Robert Stewert, Viscount Castlereagh, author of “Diary of a Journey to Damascus” (1847). He left Cairo for Damascus in May 1842 and spent five days at Mount Sinai. Castlereagh commissioned a portrait of his party from Lewis, and although Lewis sketched some of the sitters before their departure (see Schoenherr, 2005, p. 107), it is unclear if “A Frank Encampment” was the picture commissioned in 1842 or if Lewis even observed the group at Mount Sinai. Castlereagh wears native dress and adopts a languid posture, recumbent amid a bevy of accoutrements-some “Eastern,” such as the hookah, some “Western,” such as tea, books, furniture, newspapers, and even a bottle of Harvey’s Sherry. In contrast, the local sheik Hussein of Gebel Tor (the Arabic name for Mount Sinai) stands erect, his serious, and perhaps dubious, expression directed towards the bloated lord whom he has agreed to guide across the desert. The monumental Monastery of St. Catherine in the distance serves as an appropriate backdrop for this encounter, a site of Christian pilgrimage and an active mosque. Emily Weeks observed in this work the “fragility of borders and the falseness of boundaries” that challenge the binary of East and West (Weeks, 2004, p. 240).

   Lewis exhibited the work at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1856. When John Ruskin visited the exhibition, he singled out this work for his highest praise, “I have no hesitation in ranking it among the most wonderful pictures in the world” (Ruskin, “Works”, vol. 14, p. 74).

--Morna O'Neill,2007-01

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birds | books | camels (mammals) | carpets | convent | desert | dogs (animals) | ducks | expedition | food | furniture | gazelle | genre subject | hunting | interpreter | map | men | monastery | newspaper | pilgrimage | rabbits | reclining | tea | tents | turbans | umbrella

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