Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor in British Art at the University of Sydney. She is a coeditor of Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, also published by Duke University Press.

INTIMATE OUTSIDERS

The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel LiteratureBy MARY ROBERTS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3956-4

Contents

Illustrations………………………………………………………..ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………xiIntroduction: Intimate Outsiders……………………………………….1Chapter One. The Languid Lotus-Eater……………………………………19Chapter Two. “Mr Lewis’s Oriental Paradises”…………………………….38Chapter Three. Pleasures in Detail……………………………………..59Chapter Four. Being Seen………………………………………………80Chapter Five. Sartorial Adventures and Satiric Narratives…………………92Chapter Six. The Politics of Portraiture behind the Veil………………….109Chapter Seven. Oriental Dreams…………………………………………128Epilogue…………………………………………………………….150Notes……………………………………………………………….157Selected Bibliography…………………………………………………177Index……………………………………………………………….187

Chapter One

THE LANGUID LOTUS-EATER

It was the infrastructure of mass travel and modern tourism that brought William Makepeace Thackeray to Cairo in 1844, and yet the wry humor of his travelogue reflects his misgivings about the value of the experiences it yielded. Distinguishing between the casual traveler and the expatriate, Thackeray privileged the latter as having the more profoundly transformative experience. While the writer’s own experience was that of the casual visitor, his admiration is evident in his account of the artist John Frederick Lewis, who was by contrast a long-term resident of the city. Thackeray stayed in Cairo no more than one week, and the ancient city was one of dozens of destinations on his three-month voyage. He moved around at break-neck speed visiting the most important sites: the pyramids, the mosque of Sultan Hasan, and the Citadel. In his writing about these experiences his enthusiasm for the picturesque scenes of daily life in the ancient city was in counterpoint to an undertone of amused disenchantment. The freneticism of tourism seemed to dull his responses and those of his fellow travelers. At the first site of the pyramids from his Nile steamer, Thackeray felt no sense of awe but rather a dull sensation of having seen them before. Noticing that his fellow travelers were more absorbed in their victuals than the sight of one of the world’s ancient wonders, he concluded that, like himself, “nobody was seriously moved.” The sheer speed of modern travel to the East seemed responsible for this disenchantment, and the parodic figure of Waghorn (an undisguised reference to the man who had organized the Egyptian part of the journey for the P & O company) became the focus for his misgivings about this experience. “Lieutenant Waghorn is bouncing in and out of the [Cairo hotel] courtyard full of business. He only left Bombay yesterday morning, was seen in the Red Sea on Tuesday, is engaged to dinner this afternoon in the Regent’s Park, and (as it is about two minutes since I saw him in the courtyard) I make no doubt he is by this time at Alexandria or at Malta, say, perhaps, at both.” Thackeray playfully compares Napoleon’s failed conquest of Egypt to Waghorn’s triumph: “[He has] conquered the Pyramids themselves; dragged the unwieldy structures a month nearer England than they were, and brought the country along with them.”

In contrast to his critique of the experience of modern tourism, Thackeray had a great deal more respect for a more thoroughgoing immersion in local culture. It is for this reason that he wrote so admiringly about John Frederick Lewis and the lifestyle he led as an expatriate artist. Lewis had been resident in Cairo for three years when Thackeray visited him, and he stayed for a further seven years before returning to England. In Thackeray’s opinion Lewis had completely assimilated to local life by living in the Arab quarter, far from the tourist hotels. Thackeray’s laconic description promoted the notion of Lewis as a “languid lotus-eater,” dressed la turque, who lived as a wealthy Ottoman, thus implying that he had an insider’s knowledge of harem life. This mythology tapped into a cherished European myth about cultural cross-dressing and lent a veracity to Lewis’s Orientalist paintings. Thackeray’s account of Lewis was first published while the artist was still resident in Cairo and it was well-known to his British audience by the time Lewis initiated his career as an Orientalist painter by exhibiting The Hhareem (Plate 1) at the Old Watercolour Society in 1850. Given the brevity of Thackeray’s visit to Cairo, these were very much first impressions of Lewis’s life; however, the writer created an appealing mythology of Lewis going native that was to have a lasting impact, being reiterated in all subsequent art historical accounts. Lewis’s intimacy with life in Cairo, resulting from his residence there for almost a decade, distinguishes the artist from other British Orientalist painters of his generation, and for many, the veracity of his Orientalist paintings are attributed to the life he led there.

What interests me is the effect of this coalescence of art and life because it is paradigmatic of the authority that the expatriate artist could accrue in his home country as a result of his experiences abroad. Going native gave Lewis an authority, in the eyes of his British audience, to represent the harem. In turn, the realistic visual language of his painting established a fictional intimacy for the male viewer by offering a point of identification with the artist’s viewpoint. Through this ethnographic mode, Lewis found an acceptable way of representing a fantasy of the harem to his Victorian audience. In this chapter I examine these early years of Lewis’s Orientalist career, contrasting Thackeray’s mythology with the exigencies of Muhammad Ali’s Cairo of the 1840s, thereby historicizing Lewis’s Cairo years. Shifting from Cairo to England, I examine the critical fortunes of Lewis’s first and most popular harem painting, which establishes a model of spectatorship fusing ethnography with fantasy. This forms a counterpoint to the alternative harem fantasies of his later paintings and the representations of the harem by women Orientalists that I take up in the chapters that follow. When we track the shift of the artist and his work from Cairo to England, what comes into focus are the processes of translation and transformation that occur: of translation across cultures as the expatriate accrues authority as an intermediary for his British audience and a transformation of the idea of the harem into a convincing visual fiction: the realist fantasy.

Lewis’s life in Cairo remains enigmatic because he provided no written commentary on this period. The most significant evidence we have from the artist himself is the profound impact the journey had upon his art. Although Lewis’s artistic career was well established before he left England for his long sojourn abroad in 1837, he was primarily known in these early years for animal paintings and genre scenes. Preceding his Orientalist career, in the 1830s he was referred to as “Spanish Lewis” because of the numerous paintings of Spanish subjects he completed after traveling through Spain between 1832 and 1834. But his trip to Cairo via Istanbul, which the painter embarked upon in 1837, was to transform his practice entirely. This journey set him on a path as a painter who was almost exclusively preoccupied with Orientalist subjects for the remainder of his life. Not only was he one of the few British artists to spend such a lengthy period of time in North Africa, but he was also the only British Orientalist who consistently painted harem scenes. Other major painters, such as Frederick Goodall, Frederick Leighton, and David Roberts, included the harem among the variety of Eastern themes they depicted, but none painted it so often, and none became so completely synonymous with it in the eyes of the art public.

In lieu of a first-person narrative, Thackeray’s account of Lewis, published in his Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, has held sway. The particular appeal of Thackeray’s account lies in its vivid construction of Lewis’s Oriental masquerade and its masterful performance of the artist’s cultural assimilation. In Cairo, Thackeray discovered the artist living in the Arab quarter, away from the expatriate community, transformed from the dandy of the London club, living “a hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life” in the “most complete Oriental fashion.” Setting the scene, Thackeray characterized Lewis’s courtyard and house as picturesque and quintessentially Oriental:

We made J.’s quarters; and, in the first place, entered a broad covered court or porch, where a swarthy, tawny attendant, dressed in blue, with white turban, keeps a perpetual watch. Servants in the East lie about all the doors, it appears; and you clap your hands, as they do in the dear old “Arabian Nights,” to summon them. This servant disappeared through a narrow wicket, which he closed after him; and went into the inner chambers to ask if his lord [J. F. Lewis] would receive us.

A slippage between fantasy and realist observation in this text ensures that contemporary Cairo becomes synonymous with the Arabian Nights fantasy, a device through which Thackeray imagines himself as a visitor to Lewis as Eastern lord. The erotic possibilities of this identification are augmented by Thackeray’s description of a woman inside Lewis’s house observing the writer through the lattice screens: “There were wooden lattices to those arched windows, through the diamonds of one of which I saw two of the most beautiful, enormous, ogling, black eyes in the world, looking down upon the interesting stranger.” The entire narrative entertains an image of Lewis as harem master with slaves at his beck and call, and this allusion to his serving girl encourages the reader to imagine what transpires in the private quarters of the house, which seem veiled in all the mystery of the Oriental harem.

The emphasis on transformation is further enhanced when Lewis emerges to greet him. Thackeray suggests that Lewis looks like and lives as an Orientalized gentleman. The writer gives us a vivid picture of his first encounter:

J- appeared. Could it be the exquisite of the “Europa” and the “Trois Frres?” A man-in a long yellow gown, with a long beard somewhat tinged with gray, with his head shaved, and wearing on it first a white wadded cotton nightcap, second, a red tarboosh-made his appearance and welcomed me cordially. It was some time, as the Americans say, before I could “realise” the semillant J. of old times. He shuffled off his outer slippers before he curled up on the divan beside me. He clapped his hands, and languidly called “Mustapha.” Mustapha came with more lights, pipes, and coffee; and then we fell to talking about London, and I gave him the last news of the comrades in that dear city. As we talked, his Oriental coolness and languor gave way to British cordiality; he was the most amusing companion of the -club once more. He has adopted himself outwardly, however, to the Oriental life. When he goes abroad he rides a gray horse with red housings, and has two servants to walk beside him. He wears a very handsome, grave costume of dark blue, consisting of an embroidered jacket and gaiters, and a pair of trousers, which would make a set of dresses for an English family. His beard curls nobly over his chest, his Damascus scimitar on his thigh. His red cap gives him a venerable and Bey-like appearance. There is no gewgaw or parade about him, as in some of your dandified young Agas. I should say that he is a Major-General of Engineers, or a grave officer of State. We and the Turkified European, who found us at dinner, sat smoking in solemn divan.

Thackeray designates a particular social positioning for Lewis, conveying the artist’s intimacy with Cairo society and construing him as an expert at the Orientalist’s game of semblance. So convincing is Lewis’s charade (even down to the precision of his mannerisms) that it is some time before Thackeray can unmask the disguise and identify Lewis’s “British cordiality.” Although it is unlikely that Lewis’s costume worked as camouflage, Thackeray entertained this notion and was particularly impressed by its success in the public sphere, enabling Lewis to blend into his environment as “venerable” and “Bey-like.” The descriptive emphasis on Lewis’s clothing reinforces the assertion of his assimilation and thereby his capacity to avail himself of exotic pleasures. Thackeray’s account of Lewis’s Eastern masquerade combines artistic practicality and erotic fascination, because Lewis’s clothing facilitates his intimate knowledge of his subject matter.

For Thackeray, Lewis’s masquerade signals his transformation from dandy to Oriental. He prefaces his description by entreating his reader to recall Lewis’s previous life in London: “You remember J-, and what a dandy he was, the faultlessness of his boots and cravats, the brilliancy of his waistcoats and kid gloves; we have seen his splendour in Regent Street, in the Tuileries, or on the Toledo.” This description of Lewis’s precision in dress has its parallel in Simon Rochard’s portrait of the young Lewis (Fig. 1). In this fashionable portrait, Lewis is self-styled as the immaculately groomed dandy. Each element of dress is carefully considered and worn with self-conscious precision, from the starched dress shirt, the carefully folded black silk stock around his neck, and the neatly tailored black coat with patterned vest, to the jaunty watch chain. Together they convey an image of a fashionable gentleman of urban refinement. The theatricality of this self-presentation is further emphasized by the staged conceit of the backdrop and the dramatically withdrawn curtain. This representation of the young Lewis as man about town forms a vivid contrast to Thackeray’s word-portrait of Lewis as the reclusive “languid lotus-eater” in Cairo and its appealing image of the artist’s exotic refuge from modernity. And yet there are some significant similarities in approach to dress in Rochard’s young dandy and Lewis’s Oriental masquerade. Both are premised upon a notion of dress as artifice and a theatrical performance of the self is paramount. Indeed, the dandy, whose sartorial mode is characterized by a meticulous attention to detail, seems particularly suited to the practice of cross-cultural disguise. The performative aspect of dandyism enables Lewis to assume his Oriental guise. I would argue that Lewis’s Eastern costume operates as a supplementary layer in the dandy’s cultivation of artifice, and that Lewis, as the dandy masquerading in Eastern dress, became a surrogate for Thackeray and other British men in his intimate experience of domestic life in Cairo.

Thackeray offers a specific social designation for Lewis as a local dignitary working in a civil capacity-as a “Major-General of Engineers, or a grave officer of State.” His costume, large home, and the servants in his employ all identify him as a member of the ruling Ottoman elite who occupied the senior military and administrative positions during Muhammad Ali’s reign. By implication, Lewis enjoyed all the social privileges that such wealth and social position entailed. While situating Lewis within this elite class of Ottoman administrators, Thackeray distinguishes him from those Ottomans in Cairo who had adopted elements of European dress, whom he refers to as the “dandified young Agas.” From 1829, legislation for men’s dress was introduced by Sultan Mahmut II, making the fez and Western jacket and trousers mandatory for civilian men throughout the empire, thus extending the clothing reforms introduced into the Ottoman military the previous year. Significantly the only element of this dress reform that Lewis adopted was the tarboosh (or fez), which had Eastern, not Western origins. It was this element of Lewis’s dress in particular that, according to Thackeray, marked him out as “venerable and Bey-like.” For Thackeray, the Europeanized dress of the “dandified young agas” in Cairo was at odds with Orientalist exoticism.

In contrast with his celebration of Lewis’s assimilated position, Thackeray was deeply disenchanted with the Ottoman elite he encountered in Cairo. The author disdained all the visible signs of engagement with European culture that he observed in Alexandria and Cairo, and as a tourist he lamented being unable to get beyond what he determined were the superficialities of this imported European culture. His admiration for Lewis stems from the perception that this expatriate resident had penetrated traditional culture and escaped the constraints of civilization by creating for himself a lifestyle and an abode that was comparable to traditional Ottoman domestic life. Thackeray plays a crucial role as a witness whose testimony affirms Lewis’s cultural assimilation. For Thackeray, the appeal of this lifestyle resides in the retreat from the stifling pressures of modern urban life, encapsulated in the physical constraints imposed by formal clothing: “He was away from evening-parties … he needn’t wear white kid-gloves, or starched neckclothes, or read a newspaper.”

(Continues…)

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