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Study for Mehmet Ali Pasha
About the Artwork
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.
Provenance
1986: (sale, Bill Thomson, London, May/June 1986, no. 37) 1986: (Henry Strachey, London, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland OH) 1986-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland OH
Exhibition history
Year in Review for 1986. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 4-March 15, 1987). The Birth and Flowering of British Romantic Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 1-July 22, 1990). British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 10-May 26, 2013).
Quick Overview
- Artist
- John Frederick Lewis (British, 1805–1876)
- Date
- c. 1844
- Medium
- 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.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
- Accession no.
- 1986.78
More by John Frederick Lewis in museum collections
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Open-access museum record · AT-00011132
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