In the garden of the Beis

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In the garden of the Beis (John Frederick Lewis)
In the garden of the Beis
John Frederick Lewis , 1865
oil on wood
106.5 × 68.5 cm
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston

In the garden of the Beis is a painting by the British painter John Frederick Lewis from 1865. It is one of the typical paintings of Orientalism and is now in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Great Britain.

Image content

The painting shows a young woman in a light-flooded garden, gracefully leaning over a vase of flowers and placing a sprig of lilies in it. The only oriental attribute of women is their garb, which also appears in other pictures by the same artist (e.g. "The Reception" from 1873). Lewis' wife Marian Harper was the model for the female figure. The flowers depicted could all be found in European gardens at the time the picture was created. In the foreground you can see double roses , lilies, poppies , delphiniums , cacti and fuchsias . White Madonna lilies , which are similar to those shown in the painting, can already be found on medieval panels. Fuchsias come from the New World, were cultivated in Europe as early as the 17th century and were a fashion plant in the second half of the 19th century. The background of the picture also reveals no oriental reference. Among other things, you can see a rose trunk, a lily planted in a pot and a perennial bed in which there is also delphinium.

classification

John Frederick Lewis, The Reception , 1873, oil painting, Yale Center for British Art. The detailed reproduction of the interior design is based on drawings of Lewis' house in Kario. The scene that takes place in it is the work of oriental fantasy.

The painter John Frederick Lewis is one of the most important British exponents of 19th century orientalist painting . After traveling to Italy, Spain, the Balkans and Asia Minor, he then settled in Cairo for almost ten years (1841–1851). Inspired by his observations in Cairo, Lewis also created orientalist scenes after his return to Great Britain, for example some harem scenes in which fantasy and reality mix. Also in the garden of the Beis arose after John Frederick Lewis return. In fact, the magnificence of flowers depicted is more likely to be found in a well-tended European perennial garden than in the Middle East.

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