J. Holme Maghee, New York

By des🎃cent to his daughter, Adelaide Maghee Putnam

C.G. Slo𝔍ane and Company, Washington, D.C., February 27, 19ꦜ83, lot 1824

“Art Notes,” New York Evening Post, December 31, 1873, p. 2

“Art News,” Syracuse Daily Journal, January 20, 1874, p. 2

“Fine Arts: The Water Color Exhibition—Second Notice,” New York Times, February 8, 1874, p. 3

“The Water-Color Exhibition,” Daily Graphic (New York), February 21, 1874, p. 765 (for the 🍷present lot illustrated)

United States Centennial Commission. International Exhibition, 1876. Official Catalogue Department of Art, Philadelphia, 1876, pp. 24 and 26

International Exhibition 1876, Official Catalogue, Part II, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1876, p. 25 

A.C.A.P., “Notes from Philadelphia,” The Athenaeum, no. 2553, September 30, 1876, p. 434

C.G. Sloane and Company advertisement, The Magazine Antiques, February 1983, p. 275 (for the present lot illustr💖ated)

"Furniture, Paintings and Decorative Arts sold February 25-27 at Sloan's," Antiques & The Arts Weekly, March 18, 1983, p. 88 (for the present lot illus🅷trated)

Paul E. Doros, The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, ꦛ2013, p𝄹. 18 (for the present lot illustrated)

American Society of Painters in Water Colors, New York, 1874, no. 162

United States Centennial Commission: International Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876, no. 549c

Traveling with fellow painter Robert Swain Gifford (1840–1905), Tiffany arrived in Cairo, Egypt, on November 27, 1870. The city had been revived for commerce and tourism with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. After several days, Tiffany began to feel ill, and by December 9, he was diagnosed with measles;🌄 unfortunately, this preempted any plans for an excursion on the Nile, and by Christmas the two artists were in Italy making their way back to New York.

Although Tiffany’s time in Cairo was brief, he apparently made sketches that are now lost, and he procured commercial photographs by J. Pascal Sébah (1823–1886), the Zangaki brothers (active 1860s–1890s), Félix Bonfils (1831–1885), Francis Frith (1822–1898), Wilhelm Hammerschmidt (1830–1869), Hippolyte Arnoux (active 1860s–1880s), and o🦩thers. The use of these large-format albumen prints in composing paintings and capturing details was a common practice for modern French Orientalist painters, most notably Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). Upon his return to his studio in early 1871, Tiffany relied on his collection of photographs to create a series of paintings set in Cairo. In this case, Francis Frith and Frank Mason Good (1839–1911), who had been Frith’s assistant, both photographed the view that appears in Tiffany’s watercolor. The main architectural structure is recognizable as the 1383 funerary mosque of Aytmish al-Bajasi, a Mamluk monument on Bab al-Wazir Street.

In 1874, Tiffany’s The Old and the New Mosques, "Ali Hassimin" and "Sultan El Carmel," Cairo was exhibited at the ♛seventh annual exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. The Daily Graphic featured a prominent illustration and offered an enthusiastic review:

“Louis C. Tiffany is so well-known for his Oriental scenes that▨ he needs little eulogy for this clever picture of Cairene mosque architecture. Indeed, there is little to be said 🐭about it, except that it is a magnificent study of color, with carefully elaborated details, giving a most vivid idea of the remarkable edifices depicted. The number in the catalogue is 162, and we advise all those visiting the exhibition to specially remember this richly colored work, so fine in its masses, so clear in its tone.”

🦋Then, in 1876, this painting was one of six watercolors exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

–RAM