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Lot Essay
Lewis's year long stay in Istanbul in 1840-41 gave him his first prolonged experience of Islamic culture and society. His sketches of the mosques, bazaars and scenes of local life that he encountered are remarkable for their fluency and vitality. The example here is no exception, and it is among the very few that are closely related to an exhibited work. It is the study, probably made on the spot, for A Kibab Shop, Scutari, Asia Minor, painted in two equally worked up versions: an oil, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, and a watercolour, made at about the same time for sale to an unknown client.
The differences between the preliminary sketch and the final work reveal Lewis's remarkable powers of synthesis: he transforms a run-down kebab house and its adjacent café into a scene suffused with light and colour, in which complex spatial rhythms set up a dialogue with the viewer. The constructed 'reality' of the final composition is firmly grounded in direct observation. Here, in the sketch, are the two adjacent booths that form the structure of the later work. To right, the three bearded men wearing traditional Turkish dress, drink coffee and smoke pipes, their red slippers in the foreground adding bright touches of colour to the muted tones that evoke so well the murky interior of the shop. Also present, next door, is the older man whose engagment with the viewer becomes in the final work a more reflective absorption with his accounts. Accurately rendered functional details such as the large semi-circular hearth to the right and the two large metal cooking pots in stands and small corner hearth, in the left booth, are later translated into more anecdotal or decorative elements, possibly superimposed from elsewhere.
We would like to thank Briony Llewellyn and Charles Newton for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.
The differences between the preliminary sketch and the final work reveal Lewis's remarkable powers of synthesis: he transforms a run-down kebab house and its adjacent café into a scene suffused with light and colour, in which complex spatial rhythms set up a dialogue with the viewer. The constructed 'reality' of the final composition is firmly grounded in direct observation. Here, in the sketch, are the two adjacent booths that form the structure of the later work. To right, the three bearded men wearing traditional Turkish dress, drink coffee and smoke pipes, their red slippers in the foreground adding bright touches of colour to the muted tones that evoke so well the murky interior of the shop. Also present, next door, is the older man whose engagment with the viewer becomes in the final work a more reflective absorption with his accounts. Accurately rendered functional details such as the large semi-circular hearth to the right and the two large metal cooking pots in stands and small corner hearth, in the left booth, are later translated into more anecdotal or decorative elements, possibly superimposed from elsewhere.
We would like to thank Briony Llewellyn and Charles Newton for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.