Sotheby’s Orientalist Sale Autumn 2021

Sotheby’s New Bond Street, 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA, UK

The Orientalist Sale at Sotheby’s London brings together paintings representing the landscapes, people and cultures of North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, Arabia and the Ottoman world from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This season’s sale is focused primarily on the Middle East, and includes a rare work in the oeuvre of Frederick Arthur Bridgman titled Prayer in the Mosque, Cairo, painted in 1876, shortly after his trip to Cairo in the winter of 1873-74. Bridgman’s master, Jean-Léon Gérôme also features in the sale with a work from 1858 titled At Prayer as well as the earliest version of one of the artists’s seminal compositions Prayer in the House of the Arnaut Chief from 1857.

The only Turkish work, Lot 45, is a street scene of great charm by Fabius Brest (1823–1900), who spent just four years in Turkey from 1855 to 1859, but spent the rest of his career reliving the experience in numerous capriccios in oil, some highly fanciful. This work is true to life in Istanbul in the 19th century. It is dedicated to ‘Me Mme Guerle’ but undated.

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Lot 16: Prayers in the House of the Arnaut (Albanian) Chief (est £100.000–150,000)

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Lot 7: Prayer in the Mosque, Cairo, by Frederick Aurthur Bridgman (est £150–200,000)