Dissertation

The “reality effect”: The Orientalist paintings of John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876)

Weeks, Emily M

2004

Overview

In this dissertation, I examine the life and later Orientalist painting of John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876). Though certain aspects of this artist's biography have become the stuff of legend—notably his adoption of Middle Eastern clothing and cultural habits during a ten-year period of residency in Egypt in the 1840s—and his jewel-like canvases have long been admired as decorative objects, neither Lewis nor his art have yet received the sort of sustained, scholarly attention they deserve. I will redress this point by suggesting that Lewis—one of the most sophisticated and challenging artists of the Victorian era—orchestrated a series of “reality effects” after 1841, which were meant to challenge viewers' modes of visual apprehension, to shift their understanding of truth and fiction, and, ultimately, to problematize systems of patriarchal power, both in England and abroad. As I move from Lewis's artful efforts at self-fashioning to the measured surfaces of his canvases, and from the Victorian drawing room to the harem and, finally, to the broader global political stage, Lewis emerges as a complicated, conflicted and highly attentive figure in nineteenth-century society. His pictures, moreover, are revealed not merely as technical wonders, but as the grounds on which topical and problematic issues are acknowledged by the artist in extraordinary, unique and unexpected ways. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the figure of Lewis, both as a mythic presence in Victorian society and as the center of a distinguished group of Anglo-Egyptian intellectuals in Cairo in the 1840s. Chapter 3 examines the surfaces of Lewis's paintings, suggesting a correspondence between their conflicted, intertextual compositions, and the nature of the artist's biography itself. In chapters 4 through 6, I turn my attention to the ambivalent subtexts of Lewis's pictures, in order to suggest the astuteness of their politics and their tendency to transpose geographies. I then conclude the dissertation with the examination of a singular picture in Lewis's oeuvre that, I argue, acts as a précis for Lewis's artistic project.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Art history / Biographies
• ISBN: 9780496134458, 0496134450