By The Well

Edwin Lord Weeks travelled further than most Orientalist painters and painted what he had actually seen, which sets him apart from studio fantasists. He made repeated journeys through Morocco, Persia and India, once riding overland from Trebizond to Isfahan, and wrote an illustrated account of the trip. He trained in Paris under Gérôme and Bonnat, and the academic finish is there, but the Indian pictures are brighter and airier than his teacher’s work, painted in strong daylight rather than staged gloom. Mosque courtyards, elephant processions, riverside ghats and marketplaces make up most of the output. The best of them handle crowds and architecture at once without either collapsing. He died in Paris in 1903, and the work was largely forgotten until Orientalist painting returned to the market a century later.