Important Notice

Slight and unassuming in appearance, Edwin Lord Weeks hardly resembled the intrepid adventurer he would become. He was born in 1849 into a wealthy mercantile family in New England but gravitated toward art rather than the family’s trading business. Yet the latter nurtured an early inclination toward travel and a fascination with distant lands. In the years that followed, Weeks would brave life-threatening illnesses, epidemics, floods and storms,... Slight and unassuming in appearance, Edwin Lord Weeks hardly resembled the intrepid adventurer he would become. He was born in 1849 into a wealthy mercantile family in New England but gravitated toward art rather than the family’s trading business. Yet the latter nurtured an early inclination toward travel and a fascination with distant lands. In the years that followed, Weeks would brave life-threatening illnesses, epidemics, floods and storms, treacherous terrain, and even brushes with death in pursuit of the romance and thrill of discovery.

Weeks began his career as an Orientalist painter in 1872, at the age of 23, coinciding with his first transatlantic voyage, during which he travelled through Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Over the next decade he journeyed extensively across Northern Africa and the Middle East. The desert landscapes and figurative studies inspired by these travels rendered in vivid detail places few Westerners at the time had seen outside of trade or military campaigns. Their “glowing color and atmospheric effects” soon attracted collectors from across Europe and America and established him as a favourite at the annual Paris Salons following his 1878 debut there with Moroccan Camel Driver at Tangier. (Ulrich W Hiesinger, Edwin Lord Weeks: Visions of India, New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art Inc., 2002, p. 14)

Ultimately, it was his Indian subjects that distinguished Weeks among his peers and established him as one of the most celebrated American Orientalists of the 19th century, praised for “both the novelty of the subject and the extraordinary treatment it received at his hands.” (Hiesinger, p. 10). He visited the country thrice between 1882 and 1892, exploring Lahore, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Benares, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Ahmedabad, and Bombay. The present lot, which depicts two courtesans or nautch girls at the doorway of a palace in North India-possibly Agra or Rajasthan-was painted following his first trip.

Weeks documented his observations of the country in immense detail, constructing for the reader a rich portrait of its varied climates, architecture, people, and daily life in different regions. These accounts were published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and later compiled into his 1895 book, From the Black Sea Through Persia. He also travelled with a camera and took photographs alongside producing numerous sketches of architectural details, street scenes, local dress, and other aspects of everyday life, which he would later compose into large-scale works back at his studio in Paris.

As you can see in the present lot, these visual notes allowed him to produce paintings with an extraordinary level of detail and a veracity that was unmatched even when the compositions themselves combined carefully observed elements with imagined ones. Hiesinger writes, “Weeks conveyed a sense of exactness that seems almost archaeological at times... Many of his canvases show off his ability to reproduce textures with astonishing verisimilitude, from the glistening surfaces of metalwares and ceramics to the shifting colors of gold embroidery and watered silks, to horseflesh, architecture, and ancient weapons and armor. Similarly he took obvious pleasure in rendering the infinite shadings and tactile character of old walls, their faded colors and worn uneven surfaces often punctuated by brilliant inlay of colored tiles or stone tracery.” (Hiesinger, p. 33)

Nautch girls were a common subject for every Orientalist painter and Weeks was no exception in his fascination with them. While the glint of gold on their clothing and delicate gauziness of their veils suggest an atmosphere of grandeur, he chooses to depict them in an everyday setting rather than as part of a staged spectacle. The result is a scene that feels observed rather than orchestrated, as though the viewer has happened upon a private moment in passing.

Most Orientalists and Western painters favoured a subtle tonal palette, which they deemed more appropriate than so-called “vulgar” strong colours. Weeks instead embraced a more vivid, luminous use of colour, which though unconventional for the time, perfectly captured the brilliant sunlight and tropical atmosphere of the Subcontinent. This remarkable achievement set him apart from his contemporaries and earned him the praise of many including S G W Benjamin who noted, “The art qualities in which Mr Weeks excels are light and color. He has a passion for brilliant effects but renders them so skillfully that his pictures do not seem either crude or sensational...His style is broad and his method of laying on color massive. He is in such direct sympathy with the oriental subjects he loves, that one would not imagine on looking at his pictures, that they were painted by one who was born and brought up under the cold skies, and amid the rigid social customs of New England.” (Hiesinger, p. 20)

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