A record tumbles as Orientalist art returns to favour
The British Museum’s exhibition Inspired by the East has arrived at a propitious moment for the market in Orientalist art (paintings of the Middle East by Western artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries). The exhibition underlines the role played by its chief lender, the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM), as a buyer, and also serves as a reference point for the largest sale of Orientalist paintings of recent times, which Sotheby’s will stage next week.
Like the Italian view painters of the 18th century, who supplied foreign demand for views of Venice, the Orientalists – Europeans, Britons and Americans – supplied the West with a taste of Middle Eastern magic. The Earl of Aberdeen and William Henry Vanderbilt, the American railroad magnate, were among early buyers.
As the 20th century progressed, demand diminished, until 1970, when collectors like Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, and the Coral Petroleum company in Texas (which had financial interests in the Middle East) started buying. It was then, too, that Brian Macdermot, the enterprising British stockbroker, spotted an opportunity, opening the Mathaf Gallery, specialising in Orientalist paintings, in Belgravia in 1975.
Mathaf specialised in works that could then be bought for under £2,000 each. Macdermot placed them in gold frames with Arabic motifs and sold them to his Middle Eastern contacts. Whereas buyers had previously been from the West, now people from the locations represented in the paintings – Egypt, Turkey and the Levant – began to buy. Captivated by the genre’s technical brilliance and historical significance, they dismissed the critique of Orientalism propounded by Edward Said in his 1978 book – that it was tarnished by imperialism – and regarded the paintings instead with cultural pride. Nowadays, 75 per cent of Orientalist paintings sell to Middle Eastern buyers
One of Mathaf ’s special clients bought 150 paintings over a 15-year period. Macdermot, who died in 2013, never revealed his identity but, in 1991, he published a book about the pictures entitled The Najd Collection. For 40 years, this collection has been kept in secret and never exhibited, until now, when 40 examples, worth an estimated £40 million, are to be sold. Sotheby’s is not disclosing the identity of the owner, but The Daily Telegraph has learnt that he is the secretive Saudi billionaire Nasser Al-rashid, who is now in his eighties and best known for his $250 million yacht, Lady Moura, which docks in Monaco.
By 1985, competition was mounting for the best Orientalist art, with the royal Al Thani family of Qatar beginning to show interest. That year, when Coral Petroleum was in financial difficulties, it sold its collection for £5.5 million. At the sale, Macdermot bought the German artist Gustav Bauernfeind’s 1887 painting Market in Jaffa for a record $352,000. It is now valued at £2.5 million plus. Macdermot also acquired paintings for Al-rashid by Jean-léon Gérôme, Ludwig Deutsch and Rudolf Ernst, which could sell for between £400,000 and £5 million – more than 10 times their cost.
While Al-rashid has kept out of the limelight, Syed Mohamad Albukhary, founder of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, is emerging into it. Albukhary has substantial interests in the country’s rice, sugar and power production sectors, and is sponsor of the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opened at the British Museum last year.
Almost all of the Orientalist paintings within Inspired by the East belong to the IAMM. Most have been bought since 2012, though Lucien De Guise, the exhibition curator, who is also associate curator of the IAMM, tells me Albukhary was buying before the museum opened in 1995.
The most expensive exhibit, however, has only just been hung. Two weeks ago, a ravishing painting of a woman praying in a tiled interior by Osman Hamdi Bey, the Turkish artist, which had been bought in 1976 for £1,600, came up for sale at Bonhams, estimated at £600,000. Hamdi Bey has a unique status among the Orientalists, being a Muslim and coming from the country he depicted. Since he produced only about 100 paintings, examples on the market are rare. After a lengthy bidding battle, the young woman sold for £6.3 million – a record for any Orientalist painting. The buyer was the IAMM. De Guise says: “It is Hamdi Bey’s only painting of a woman at prayer in a woman’s quarter. It’s everything we feel that a harem is about, painted by a Muslim.”
Sotheby’s is happy to refer to Bonhams’ success. In the current sale, it has a Hamdi Bey from the Najd Collection – a self-portrait in a typically tiled interior – with what now seems a reasonable estimate of £3-£5 million.