Jean-Jules Antoine Lecomte du Nouy (1842-1923) was a French academic painter who painted pictures on biblical, mythological and historical themes. But especially famous for a series of artworks depicting the life and manners of the East, which he wrote from life, bo in 1875 he made a trip to Egypt and was sincerely impressed by what he saw.
Opium smoker
However, in such a trip, in addition to the natural for any curious person desire to see the world, there was a creative and economic calculation. Paintings of the exotic East, and especially depictions of various nude concubines and slave girls, were highly prized in Europe. They corresponded to the norms of decency, because they depicted in the genre of nudes not European women, as in Manet's painting "Olympia", but Oriental beauties, whose nakedness, due to their exoticism, was perceived quite naturally.
White slave boy
Lecomte du Nouy studied under the academicians Charles Gleyre, Emile Signol and Jean-Léon Gérôme, who belonged to the Neo-Greek school, and all his life followed their ideas about art, even in those years when academism seemed hopelessly outdated, and his teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme was considered a model of sluggishness and an opponent of everything new and progressive. Perhaps he simply did not want and did not know how to write differently, did not think like Picasso over the evolution of his work and did not look for his own style, being content with what he had. However, his artwork is technically impeccable, with original compositional solutions and non-standard themes, such as the very personal and peculiar portrait of Mademoiselle de Maupin.
Portrait of Mademoiselle de Maupin
Lecomte du Nouy's early paintings are mostly on biblical themes or depict the events of Dante's Divine Comedy and Sophocles' tragedies. He regularly participated in the Paris Salon and received commissions from the French authorities to paint "proper" academic paintings.
Demosthenes is studying oratory
But gradually he moved to orientalism, which was facilitated by a visit to Egypt. And this part of his creative heritage is much more interesting, because it allowed to visualize how the inhabitants of the East looked like at that time. Simply because of the Koran's prohibition of depicting people, painting in its European sense was not too widespread in the East, although there was Persian miniature painting.
The Eunuch's Dream
One of Lecomte du Nouy's most revealing paintings is The Eunuch's Dream. All the inhabitants of an eastern city are asleep, tired from the day's cares and prayers. Only the heron, which in the East is considered the patroness of light, is awake. The eunuch is also asleep, but in order to forget himself and not think about his current situation, he resorts to smoking hashish. Surely this remains his only available joy of life. The man is young, sturdy and well-built, and it is possible that the shameful and brutal surgery he underwent was recent, and it is unlikely that he did it voluntarily. Perhaps he had been enslaved and the local Shah had decided to make him a eunuch to keep an eye on the harem. But feelings and desires have not gone anywhere, and here in a narcotic reverie the eunuch sees a naked beauty. But at the same time he sees the figure of a baby with a huge knife, that is, his dream is not pleasant, it is more like a nightmare and embodies the longing for the lost forever.
Moroccan yeshiva
The painting is full of authentic details: a carefully depicted yatagan at the headboard, a protective amulet of Hamsa in the form of an open palm in the foreground, a small table with food, a pipe with a long mouthpiece, intended for smoking hashish. Even the cityscape of Cairo is depicted as realistically as possible - one can easily recognize the majestic building of the Amr Mosque. There may not be much innovation in Lecomte du Nouy's work, but the quality of execution is remarkable.
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