NEGOCIACIÓN | Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Arthur von Ferraris (Austrian painter) 1856 - 1936
Driving a Bargain, Cairo, 1890
oil on panel
25 1/4 x 19 3/4 in. (64.1 x 50 cm.)
signed Arthur Ferraris, inscribed Paris and dated 1890 (lower left)
Private colletion

Catalogue Note
The biography of Arthur von Ferraris can be read, in part, through the style and subject matter of this remarkable work. Sometime between the late 1870s and late 1880s, Ferraris traveled to Paris to study with the renowned academic painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. It may have been Gérôme who encouraged Ferraris to travel to Cairo - the setting for this particular scene - and to adopt a similarly polished 'realist' style. Ludwig Deutsch's many pictures of daily life in Cairo may also have influenced the artist, and indeed, Caroline Juler believes that these two Viennese-trained painters may have collaborated together on several compositions (Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p 109). But it is the differences between Ferraris' works and those of his colleagues that suggest his unique artistic project, and that set the unexpected narrative of Driving a Bargain, Cairo into motion.

Ostensibly, the subject of Ferraris' picture - one of the first Orientalist works he exhibited in Paris - is the bargaining of two men over a cord of red (possibly coral or red jasper) Islamic prayer beads, outside the Mosque of Altinbugha al-Maridani in Cairo. A niche in one of the entrance porches of the mosque doubles as the merchant's shop, and allows Ferraris to demonstrate his skill as both an architectural draughtsman and as an acute observer of Egyptian society. However, and like both Gérôme and Deutsch, Ferraris makes no apologies for compositional vagaries: the niches along the façade of al-Maridani are in fact blind and, rather than showing a view into the mosque's courtyard at the left, Ferraris paints the distinctive pencil-shape of a Turkish minaret at the end of a narrow street. While not true to life, such a view was practically required of European artists in Cairo, from at least the 1840s forward.
The addition of this well-recognized vignette should not distract us from Ferraris's larger project, which was to abandon convention and give to his paintings a highly topical gloss. Throughout his career, Ferraris enjoyed great success as a society portraitist, and his sensitivity to fashion and the intricacies of costume is in fact what allows this painting to shift from the status of standard 'type' to perceptive historical document. The green turban of the central figure, for example, suggests that he is a shereef, or descendent of the Prophet, as only they were allowed to wear this culturally significant color (see Edward William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1860, 31, 132.) The embroidered clothes of the figure to the left, moreover, identify him as part of the nizam i jedid, ('new system' or 'new order') in Egypt. This term referred to the reorganization of the military along European lines under Muhammad Ali in the first decades of the nineteenth century. As part of his expansive reforms, Muhammad Ali exchanged the traditional clothing of his troops for a new uniform, featuring shorter red caps (fezzes), tighter vests, shirts and trousers, made of coarse red serge, and red shoes (Lane, 1860, p. 559, note 1; and see here fig 1.). Through this small detail, then, Driving a Bargain, Cairo distinguishes itself from the many, deliberately anachronistic or 'timeless' Orientalist genre scenes of other nineteenth-century painters, and becomes a valuable record of a cosmopolitan city in the midst of change.

While the extent of Ferraris's travels are not know, his subject matter suggests that he visited Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa. His works were exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français, at the Expositions Universelle in Paris, where Ferraris won a first prize in 1889, and internationally, in Budapest, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich. Many of his best-known pictures are set in doorways, or, as here, at the entrances to mosques and other buildings.
The Mosque of al-Maridani was built for Amir Altinbugha in c.1340. It is located near Sharia al-Tabbana and Bab-al-Wazir, in the bustling Darb al Ahmar section of Cairo. The external façades of the mosque are typical of the period, being divided into shallow panels with stalactite hoods, but the integration of many architectural styles and building materials is unique. Ferraris has taken particular care to record the mosque's distinctive marble columns, as well as the Qur'anic inscription that runs along the façade.