Study for "The Pipe Bearer"

John Frederick Lewis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lewis arrived in Cairo late in 1841 and stayed for nearly a decade, making hundreds of drawings and watercolors. This study of a Black Nubian servant wearing North African dress and holding a hookah was used, after the artist's return to London, to develop a figure in "The Pipe Bearer" (1856, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery). The image demonstrates an interest in physiognomy, and the positions different ethnic groups occupied within upper class Egyptian households. Shown in profile, the main figure's head is compared to a lighter-skinned man behind, and costume elements carefully recorded. Lewis's nuanced approach may have been influenced by David Wilkie, an artist friend he visited in Constantinople on his way to Cairo. Studies made in Egypt demonstrate the artist's eye for revealing details later used to create compositions that shaped how Britons imagined life in a society few encountered in person.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art