Code: 5075
Dimensions:
A beautiful late 19th or early 20th century oil on panel by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger which depicts a market scene in Assouan, Egypt.
The artist is very interesting - a French banking heir who studied painting and music and became a well known Orientalist painter and North African musicologist.
The work is in very good original condition and presented in it's original frame with old exhibition labels on the reverse. A similar work by Rodolphe d'Erlanger "Street in Cairo" is held by the Tate Britain Museum, London.
Artist: Rodolphe d'Erlanger (French, 1872-1932)
Title: Assouan
Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 16 x 19.5 inches (40 x 50 cm) including the frame
Rodolphe d’Erlanger, born on June 7th 1872 in Boulogne to a wealthy family of bankers of French and English Catholic upbringing, was captivated by the Arab World from an early age.
He travelled many times to Tunisia and Egypt between 1903 and 1905 in order to paint, and thus appears to be more of an artist than a researcher. Far from being a traditionalist, he was rather a modernist who borrowed western technical means that he considered would enliven the Orient without risking to deform it. D’Erlanger was first and foremost a remarkable painter.
He was married to the Italian countess Maria Elisabetta Barbiellini-Amidei. Their only son, Leo Frédéric Alfred Baron d'Erlanger (1898–1978), eventually became the head of the family-owned bank which however he sold to Philip Hill Higginson Ltd.
His palace at Sidi Bou Said, in northern Tunisia, which he named Ennejma Ezzahra was built between 1909 and 1921. The building is now a museum and houses the Centre des musiques arabes et méditerranéennes.
In the early 1930s and under the patronage of King Fuad I of Egypt, he was one of the persons who prepared the first Congress of Arabic Music, that took place in 1932 in Cairo. Although he was too ill to attend and died soon after, he sent an ensemble from Tunisia to perform at the Congress in Cairo.
