Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

signed and insribed "Th. Frere./Jerusalem" and signed and inscribed "vue de Jerusalem prise de la Vallee de Josaphat/Ch. Frere" on the stretcher 18 1/4 x 24 in. (46 x 61 cm.) Jerusalem, the city the Arabs call Alquds ("the Sanctuary"), is Islam's third holiest city after Mecca and Medine and was itself the capital of the Jewish Kingdom under David nearly a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The Vallee de Josapha is actually Jehoshaphat, the place where God was to hold audience with his people on Judgement day (Joel 3:2). It is also the symbolic name for the Valley of Codron that lies to the East of Jerusalem and into whose Garden Jesus would lead his disciples (John 18:1). This sacred place faces the ancient city where the Mosque of Omar with the prominent Dome of the Rock rises over the fortified walls. The square towers of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are also visible as are the distanct mountains of Ammion and Moab. A Student of Jules Cogniet and Camille Roqueplan, Theodore Frere was only 20 when he exhibited a view of Strasbourg at his first Salon in 1834. A trip to Algeria a few years later was to have a profound influence on his oeuvre. Frere was one of the earliest of the French Orientalists, exhibiting his first orientalist painting in 1839 and remaining fascinated by the theme throughout his life. He travelled again and again to the Holy Lands, filling his studios in both Paris and Cairo with his visions of that land of "or, d'argent et d'azur" (Theophile Gautier). Frere's view of arab landscapes were immensly popular with the European collectors of the time, notably the King of Wurstemburg and Louis-Phillippe, as well as American dealer George Lucas from 1860 onwards. His works remain in both private and museum collections across France and America. The... atmosphere of his paintings impressed other artists of the time. Writing to Eugene Boudin on June 3, 1859, Claude Monet remarked upon the beauty of an orientalist painting by Frere that he had just seen at the Paris Exhibition "(avec)..la granduer d'une lumiere chaude". The Ottoman Empire Frere offers is a place as yet untouched by the West and the mass tourism that followed the 1850's expansion of the railroads and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. He would have agreed with Leonce Benedite: le regret de voir chaque jour disparaitre sous la brutalite egoiste de notre exploitation occidentale... a fait naitre le desir de noter scrupuleusement, pour en conserver l'image tout ce qui reste encore de couleur, de poesie, d'etrangete, de seduction sous ce ciel, qui... du moins ne changera pas... (les Peintres Orientalists Francais, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, tome 21, p. 240) Frere had painted other scenes of nomadic camps overlooking Jerusalem from accross the Cedron Valley, most noteably the version in The Metropolitan Museum. Our painting is a smaller version of the artist's highly successful entry to the Salon of 1881. A reduced version of the picture was exhibited in the Paris Salon 1881 (see Lynn Thornton The Orientalist-Painter Travellers 1828-1908, Paris, 1983, p. 57).