The midday meal, Cairo

The midday meal, Cairo is not only one of Lewis's largest paintings but one of his last. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, together with a smaller oil, A Cairo bazaar: The dell'al, and a watercolour, On the banks of the Nile, upper Egypt. A few months after the exhibition opened, on 14 August, he died at his home at Walton-on-Thames, aged 71. Only one more work was to appear at the R.A., an unfinished canvas being shown by way of a memorial in 1877.

Lewis came from a family of artists, and it was in this context, rather than at the Royal Academy Schools, that he gained his professional training. His father, Frederick Christian Lewis, was an engraver, and wanted John, his eldest son, to follow him. Indeed, the boy did practice engraving and etching from an early age, an experience that no doubt had a bearing on the precision and finesse which characterises his work as a painter. However, he had higher ambitions, and from the age of 15 was exhibiting regularly at the R.A. and the British Institution, focussing on animal and sporting subjects similar to those of the young Edwin Landseer, his slightly older contemporary whom he had known since boyhood. At this period he was also employed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the President of the R.A., as an 'assistant draughtsman'.

In the late 1820s, possibly to distance himself from Landseer, Lewis turned his attention to watercolour and to a new range of subject matter, landscape and genre. He had already explored Windsor Great Park and Bedfordshire, and in 1827 he made his first foreign tour, visiting Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy as far as Venice. The same year he was elected an associate of the Old Watercolour Society, and full membership followed in 1829. Meanwhile he continued to travel widely at home, particularly in Devonshire and the Scottish Highlands. In time-honoured fashion he would fill his sketchbooks with memoranda of landscape and picturesque local life that could be worked up into finished, exhibitable watercolours on his return.

This was to remain the pattern of Lewis's professional life, although his concept of travel grew increasingly ambitious and exotic. In 1832 he left for an extended tour in Spain, following in the footsteps of his friend David Wilkie, one of the first artists to visit Spain after the Peninsular War, but slightly anticipating another intimate, David Roberts. Enjoying the patronage of the wealthy traveller and amateur artist Richard Ford, he visited Madrid, where he copied pictures in the Prado and narrowly missed an encounter with Delacroix, as well as Toledo, Granada, Cordova and Seville. Returning to England in 1834, he produced some brilliant accounts of Spanish life that were highly acclaimed when shown at the O.W.C.S. He also published two series of lithographs, Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra (1835) and Lewis's Sketches of Spain and Spanish Character (1836). dedicating them respectively to the Duke of Wellington and Wilkie. Although he had only been in Spain for two years, the 1830s in general may be designated his 'Spanish period'.

Lewis's exploits in Spain had introduced him to the Islamic world. He was fascinated by the Alhambra, the romantic fortress and palace of the Moorish kings of Granada, and before he turned his steps homeward he visited Morocco. In 1837 he left England again, this time for what would prove an absence of 14 years. Having wintered in Paris, he moved on to Italy, stopping off in Florence, touring extensively in the southern part of the country, and reaching Rome in 1839. Richard Green has made the interesting suggestion that while there he saw the recently completed Odalisque with the slave by Ingres, the director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici, and that this experience is reflected in the harem subjects that are such a notable feature of his later work.

Leaving Rome early in 1840, Lewis travelled to Constantinople, seeing Albania, Corfu, Athens and Smyrna en route. He spent the best part of a year in the Levant, but in November 1841, at the age of thirty-six, he sailed for Egypt. He was to remain there for a decade, settling in Cairo but making numerous excursions to the Sinai desert, Suez and the Upper Nile. He even found a wife in Egypt, marrying an English girl, Marian Harper, at Alexandria in 1847. They had no children, possibly from choice since Lewis was singlemindedly devoted to his work and Marian was the loyalest of adjuncts, caring for his every needs looking after his business affairs, and often acting as his model.

Lewis was unusual among English artists attracted to the East. While most made only brief visits before returning home, he not only lived in the area for an extensive period but, as we should say today, 'went native'. Moreover, while many, like David Roberts or W.J. Müller, were primarily interested in the architectural or archaeological sights, or again, like Holman Hunt, were drawn to the region because of its religious significance, Lewis focussed almost exclusively on contemporary Arab life, seeking the colourful and picturesque exactly as he had done earlier in the Highlands, Spain or Rome.

Lewis's house in Cairo was in the quarter to the north known as the Ezbekiyah, near the Bab-el-luk gate and the great mosque of Sultan Hassan. Like so much of Cairo at the time, it was a mean-looking and crowded area, though not without some fine buildings, including the new Hotel d'Orient, and spacious squares. Lewis's house was close to a cemetary, which was haunted by ravenous dogs, although beyond this were gardens and kiosks, palm-groves and a glimpse of the Nile. W.M. Thackeray, an old friend, dined with the artist in 1844 and recorded the experience: 'Lewis,' he wrote, was living 'like a languid Lotus-eater, a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life'. His house was situated in a cool, shady, narrow alley, so narrow that it was with great difficulty - his highness Ibrahim Pasha happening to pass at the same moment - that my little procession of two donkeys could range ourselves along the wall and leave room for the august cavalcade ... First we came into a broad open court with a covered gallery running along one side of it. A camel was reclining on the grass; near him was a gazelle to glad (the artist) with his dark blue eye and a numerous brood of hers and chickens to furnish his liberal table.'

On the opposite side of the covered gallery rose up the walls of his long, queer, many-windowed, many-galleried house. 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 strangers. Pigeons were flapping and hopping and fluttering and cooing about ... (This hall of audience) is about forty feet long, and eighteen or twenty high. All the ceiling is carved, gilt, painted and embroidered with arabesques and choice sentences of Eastern writing. Some Memeluke Aga, or Bey, whom Mehemet Ali invited to breakfast and massacred, was the proprietor of this mansion once ...

When these things had been examined at leisure, (Lewis) appeared ... He has adapted himself outwardly to the oriental life. When he goes abroad he rides a grey horse with red housings, and has two servants to walk behind 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 Demascus scimitar over his thigh. His red cap gives him a venerable and Bey-like appearance. There is no gewgaw or parade about him...

His dinners were excellent. We had delicate cucumbers stuffed with forced meats, (and) yellow smoking pilaffs, the pride of the oriental cuisine ... We ended with ruby pommegranates, pulled to pieces, deliciously cool and pleasant.

During his ten years in Cairo, Lewis collected a vast amount of material for pictures; some six hundred drawings and watercolours are said to be recorded. He not only drew his own house, inside and out, and its immediate neighbourhood; he endlessly explored the wider city, with its teaming suqs or bazaars, its gardens, canals and tree-lined avenues, its forests of minarets and its four hundred mosques, 'rising', as one traveller put it, 'like enormous bubbles over the sea of houses'. He was obsessed by interiors, the mystery of figures in shadow and the intricate effects of sunlight filtering through meshes of lattice-work onto patterned surfaces. But he was no less fascinated by the desert and the life of the bedouin, their camels and other animals, seen in sharpest relief under a merciless midday sun.

Lewis returned to England in the spring of 1851, never to go abroad again. He was still only forty-five, and had twenty-five years of creative life before him in which to give form to the myriad impressions he had gained in Egypt. Three distinct types of theme were to preoccupy him during this long final period: harem subjects, with their hints of the women's mysterious, withdrawn existence; desert emcampments, evoking the stoicism of the bedouin tribesmen; and bazaar and street scenes bursting with raucous life.

Lewis's reputation, so high during the 1830s, had inevitably been eclipsed by his long sojourn abroad and failure even to send pictures home for exhibition, but his Eastern subjects, as brilliantly executed as ever and with a new subltety of mood and depth of colour, soon brought him renewed popularity and acclaim. Even before he set foot in England The hareem (Victoria and Albert Museum) had caused a sensation when it appeared at the O.W.C.S., selling for the enormous price (for a watercolour) of £1,000, Edward Lear, himself an indefatigable Eastern traveller, was one of his greatest admirers, 'There never have been, and there never will be,' he told Lewis's wife not long before the artist's death, 'any works depicting oriental life more truly beautiful and excellent, perhaps I might say so beautiful and excellent. For besides the exquisite and conscientious workmanship, the subjects painted by J. F. Lewis are perfect as representations of real scenes and people... I go to the R. A. chiefly on account of his pictures'. John Ruskin was another devotee. Bowled over by Lewis's Frank encampment, the greatest of all his desert subjects, when it was exhibited at the O.W.C.S. in 1856, he declared that it 'ranked amongst the most wonderful pictures in the world', adding characteristically: 'nor do I believe that, since the death of Paul Veronese, anything has been painted comparable to it in its own way'. Ruskin was not always so complimentary but he remained a great champion of Lewis, counting him as a sort of honorary Pre-Raphaelite because of his fanatical attention to detail.

In 1855 Lewis was elected president of the O.W.C.S. on the death of Copley Fielding. Three years later, however, he resigned, being determined to take up oil painting again, partly at Ruskin's instigation but also because it was more paying and, as a married man with a household to keep up, he needed the money. In accordance with this resolution, the Royal Academy became his chief place of exhibition from now on. Having not shown there since 1836, he submitted two pictures in 1854, and fifty-one more were to follow before his death twenty-two years later. He was elected A.R.A. in 1859 and a full academician in 1864, taking the place left vacant by his old friend David Roberts.

As we have seen, The midday meal, Cairo was one of the very last works Lewis exhibited at the Academy. It is a little unusual in that it does not fall into any of the three main catagories of his Eastern subjects. In fact it seems more autobiographical than most, though whether it actually shows his house in the Ezbekiyah quarter of Cairo, or is an amalgam based on a number of sources, is hard to say. Some hint of Lewis's working method is offered by the fact that the elderly, bearded diner in a pink coat re-appears with a different head-dress as the schoolmaster in Interior of a school, Cairo, a watercolour of 1865 in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig. 1). On the other hand The midday meal undoubtedly represents a remarkable pictorial parallel to the description of Lewis's house left by Thackeray, right down to the details of the dinner that the novelist was given.

Conceptually and technically, moreover, the picture is highly characteristic. It shows all Lewis's interest in effects of light, perhaps the feature that does more than anything to unite the work of his post-Cairo period, whatever its ostensible subject. It also betrays all his meticulous workmanship and attention to detail. No wonder Ruskin saw him as a crypto-Pre-Raphaelite. In fact in his reminiscences, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), Holman Hunt records an interesting conversation that he and Millais had with Lewis in the early days of the P.R.B. They had heard that on his return to England in 1851 Lewis had expressed his dismay at the sorry state of English art and his belief that 'its only hope' lay in 'the reform which we were conducting'. They were, therefore, somewhat crestfallen when Lewis, displaying 'the querulous temper he was reputed to have at times', laid into them as follows: 'You should know that although I think your painting much better than that of most of the artists exhibiting, I am sure that oil painting could be made more delicate than either of you make it; not sufficient pains are taken to make the surface absolutely level. Why should it ever be more piled up than in watercolour?... Holbein's paintings are as smooth as plate-glass, why should not yours be equally even?' In the 1860s, when Lewis was teaching in the R.A. Schools, his method of working caused consternation among the students. As one of them recorded: 'Lewis used no bodycolour, except (in) the half-tones and highlights. The very perfection of his work made it hard for him to teach, and impossible for us to follow. We all felt we could possibly work something like Frith, or Cope, or Phillip, or Millais, but Lewis's work was so microscopic, so absolute, that we despaired of imitating him or walking in his footsteps'.

Seven years before the picture and its smaller companion, A Cairo bazaar, were exhibited, the R.A. had moved from Trafalgar Square to its present home in Burlington House. Both pictures were hung in Gallery III, the great central space in the exhibition complex. The room was dominated by Frederic Leighton's enormous Daphnephoria (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), generally considered to be the picture of the year. Here too were C.W. Cope's Selecting pictures for the Royal Academy Exhibition, painted for the R.A. and still in its possession, a key document, on a par with Frith's Private view, 1881, in shaping our perceptions of the Victorian art establishment; and a number of other pictures that have since found their way into public collections: Sir John Gilbert's Richard II resigning the crown to Bolingbooke (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), G.F. Watts's By the sea (Victoria Art Gallery, Bath), Alma-Tadema's An audience at Agrippa's (Dick Institute, Kilmarnock) and Albert Moore's Beads (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). In all, the room contained over a hundred pictures, offering a fascinating microcosm of the R.A. at its mid-Victorian zenith. There were artists here who had been around for ages, men like Thomas Webster, Richard Redgrave, Thomas Sidney Cooper, Paul Falconer Poole, or indeed Lewis himself, who were now in their late sixties or seventies and sometimes, as in Lewis's case, nearing the end of their careers. Others - John Everett Millais, B.W. Leader, W.F. Yeames, W.Q. Orchardson and P.H. Calderon, for instance - were in their prime; while a few - Albert Moore, Alfred Parsons, or the twenty-five year old Cecil Gordon Lawson - represented a younger generation and, in Moore's case, radical new ideas. The sense of changing guard was epitomised by the juxtaposition of three portraits by Sir Francis Grant, the seventy-three year old president, and the eye-catching masterpiece by Leighton, who was to succeed Grant two years later. Under Leighton's peerless leadership the R.A. would go on to enjoy even greater prestige and authority, but the days of its almost unrivalled supremacy were numbered. The following year, 1877, would see the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery to showcase the Aesthetic movement and offer a more liberal alternative to the august but hidebound incumbent of Burlington House.

The midday meal was not ideally placed. It had to contend with an incongruous neighbour, Poole's Meeting of Oberon and Titania, described by one reviewer as an 'unfortunate treatment of a somewhat hackneyed subject', offering 'little to praise or interest save the weird contortions of the elves'; while immediately above it hung 'one of the most unpleasing portraits of the year, James Sant's Mademoiselle Zaré Thalberg, which showed the sitter unhappily 'posed as an allegorical representation of Fame'.

Perhaps partly because of this unsympathetic context, reviews of Lewis's picture were mixed. No critic failed to mention it; indeed, their comments are a good example of how seriously the Victorians took their pictures, discussing them at what now seems incredible lengths and often in embarrassingly florid prose. But while on the whole the picture was greatly admired, few critics could resist finding faults of some kind, either in relation to the general conception or specific details.

The Spectator, for example, thought it 'a gorgeous piece of colour, almost like a page from an old missal in its combination of brilliant hues, but somewhat deficient in interest and confused'. Similarly, the Times described 'Mr J.F. Lewis's Cairene interior' as 'gem-like', although ultimately it found such a 'feast of colour fatiguing rather than delightful', and longed for 'a little more repose'.

William Michael Rossetti, writing in the Academy, was Lewis's most curmudgeonly critic. As a painter of oriental subjects, he began,
Mr Lewis has for an indefinite number of years been facile princeps, yet we cannot say that his works this year would quite have availed to create for him the reputation which they moderately sustain. He falls into too crude a brightness in the tints of his draperies. In his Midday meal, Cairo, the superior points are the grinning negro, the attendant seen at a distance in light through a doorway, the old man whi is making short work with a slice of melon, and the other one, less aged, who reaches out for a fruit, his face shadowed, but varied with slight gleams of light; the elaborate screen-work at the back of the courtyard is also a remarkable piece of delicate painstaking. We cannot account for the very inefficient legs of the front figure coming through the door: he almost looks as if he had stilts on, instead of ankles and feet.

Another critic with Pre-Raphaelite affiliations, the Athenaeum's F.G. Stephens was more up-beat. He felt that Lewis,
gives us an almost fairy-like notion of oriental splendour and luxury in his Midday meal, Cairo. The scene is a courtyard, with sunlight on the carved balconies and dense foliage; in a balcony on our right [sic] is a party at dinner, seated round a low table, spread with melons, peaches and gigantic grapes. One of the chiefs of the gorgeously dressed company has joked, and obedient smiles attend his wit; even the slaves who wait laugh. In these expressions lie the difficulty and the triumph of such pictures, for they are admirable proofs of Mr Lewis's power of dealing with facial humour, as vivacious and varied as it is possible to conceive. The best face is that of an old man in a green turban [sic], who stretches forward to obtain another piece of melon from the table. It is a fine characteristic of the design that the central element..., the incident of the reception of the joke, is so completely supported throughout... None of the figures is 'to let', or looks as if placed to fill gaps in the composition.

Stephens, like the critic on the Times, found a want of 'repose' in the picture, but noted that this, like 'the delicate execution', was 'characteristic of Mr Lewis's manner'. The worst he could say was that 'the figures in the courtyard below are disproportionately small, the lighting is rather chilly, and the shadows are thin, almost to a fault'.

The picture was almost certainly bought direct from the artist by James Dyson Perrins, the head of the firm of Lea and Perrins, makers of Worcester sauce. Certainly he had it by 1878, when he lent it to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Perrins was a keen and perceptive collector of English pictures. He owned two major works by D.G. Rossetti, The Blue Bower (Barber Institute, Birmingham) and The Blessed Damozel (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard), as well as examples of Etty, Millais, Holman Hunt, Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Fred Walker and G.F. Watts. His most typical purchases, however, were pictures representing exotic foreign locations or local life. When his pictures sold at Sotheby's in 1959, the seventy-eight oils and watercolours on offer included no fewer than eighteen Venetian views by James Holland, together with two Spanish subjects by John Phillip and topographical works by Turner, Bonington, Birket Foster, Clarkson Stanfield, E.W. Cooke, Frederick Goodall, W.J. Müller and David Roberts. Whether Perrins was a keen traveller himself, and these pictures were in the nature of glorified postcards, we do not know, but even if they were, taste as well as subject matter clearly guided him as a collector. His finest Turner, Palestrina, was to be bequeathed to the National Gallery by his son in 1958, being transferred to the Tate Gallery three years later.

It is not difficult to see how Lewis fitted into this collecting pattern. In all, Perrins had five examples of this work, two watercolours and three oils. The earliest was Caged doves, Cairo, a watercolour of 1864 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), the latest The midday meal. All were shown at the Royal Academy, and it seems likely that Perrins bought them there. The others included The bazaars, Cairo, a watercolour of 1872 that Perrins also lent to the 1878 Exhibition in Paris and that is now in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, and Indoor gossip, Cairo, a harem subject of 1873 now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Perrins must have died before 1887 since it was Mrs Dyson Perrins, his widow, who lent the picture to the Royal Jubilee Exhibition held at Manchester that year. This was one of the great shows of the late Victorian era, consciously modelled on the famous Art Treasures Exhibition that had been held in the same city exactly thirty years earlier.

On Mrs Perrins's death the collection descended to her only son, C.W. Dyson Perrins (1864-1958), as keen a collector as his father but with different interests, and well known in his day as a philanthropist. Inheriting the substantial fortune generated by the Lea and Perrins firm, he was mayor of Worcester in 1897 and high sheriff of Worcestershire two years later. He was also a life governor of Birmingham University and a generous benefactor of Malvern College, Oxford University, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. As a collector, his chief claim to fame lies in a superb assemblage of illuminated manuscripts and early printed books, put together in that halcyon period for collectors in this field, the first two decades of the twentieth century, but he also formed an unrivalled collection of Worcester porcelain and played a leading role in supporting and managing the factory, going so far as to sell his incunabula after the second world war to prevent its closure. His portrait was painted by Arthur Hacker.

C.W. Dyson Perrins kept his parents' pictures until his death, after which they appeared at Sotheby's. The only exceptions we know of were Turner's Palestrina and Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, which had been sold at some unknown date to Grenville Winthrop, whose pictures are now in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Lewis's Midday meal went to the art trade and has subsequently been in private collections in England and America. A smaller watercolour version of the picture (Lewis, no. 620) was on the London art market in 1979, and a pen-and-ink study for the composition is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (no. 437'07).