Sale: Doyle's, New York, 19 May 1983, lot 25

Mathaf Gallery, London

Purchased from the above

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 228, cited, p. 2𝄹30, catalogued & illustrated

London, Mathaf Gallery, Spring Exhibition, Important Orientalist Paintings of the 19th Century, 1984, illustrated in the catalogue

Coffee houses were a popular meeting and social space in Northern Africa in which all classes could mix freely. Indigenous to the Horn of Africa, coffee emerged as a popular drink to be traded and enjoyed in the fifteenth century. By the nineteenth century, Cairo had grown into the most important point of ✃distribution for Yemenite coffee.

Capturing an everyday scene outside a Cairo coffee house, the present example depicts tw🦂o young girls selling oranges to passers-by, while a group of men, absorbed in a board game, each contemplate their next move.