Study for Mehmet Ali Pasha (c. 1844): Art, History and Details

Study for Mehmet Ali Pasha (c. 1844) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Frederick Lewis (British, 1805–1876).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing was a study for a larger watercolor (now at the Victoria and Albert Museum) of Mehmet Ali Pasha, considered by many as the "Father of Modern Egypt." While European travel to the Middle East burgeoned during the mid 19th century, John Frederick Lewis was more intrepid than most, living and painting in Cairo for a decade. Upon his return to England in 1851, he astonished London audiences with more than 600 watercolors that conjured an exotic world of sumptuous colors and textures articulated in painstaking detail.

Object facts

• Title: Study for Mehmet Ali Pasha
• Date: c. 1844
• Creator attribution: John Frederick Lewis (British, 1805–1876)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor, gouache, black chalk, and graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 36.2 x 24.6 cm (14 1/4 x 9 11/16 in.); Secondary Support: 44.3 x 33 cm (17 7/16 x 13 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1986.78

A detail from the museum

Lord Elphinstone, governor of Madras, described this drawing in an 1845 letter as "the best, and in fact, the only good likeness [of Mehmet Ali Pasha] I have seen, and I saw it within a quarter of an hour of leaving the original."

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1986." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (1987): 38-79.
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.