Lot Details
Lot 2445
Charles Gifford Dyer
1851-1912
Cairo - The Return of the Mahmal from Mecca
Signed Charles Gifford Dyer and dated indistinctly with Roman numerals (lr)
Oil on canvas
38 1/2 x 28 inches
Born in Chicago, Charles Gifford Dyer graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and saw some service in the Civil War. He resigned his commission due to poor health and traveled to Europe to study art in Paris. In 1871 he entered the Royal Academy in Munich, and in 1876 studied there with the American David Neal. With Munich as his home base, he spent several summers in Rome and Venice, and worked extensively in Egypt and Syria. Dyer often painted Venetian architectural subjects; the basilica of San Marco appears in several compositions, including one exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1875. He also favored picturesque ruins and exotic themes inspired by his travels and reflecting the prevailing vogue for orientalism. The present example, depicting a celebratory procession through the streets of Cairo, reflects the artist's propensity for architectural themes as well as his facility with describing the texture of materials ranging from masonry to polished metal surfaces and softly billowing fabric. In 1910 J. Pierpont Morgan commissioned Dyer to create a series of thirty paintings depicting Greek ruins which was never completed.
In 1880, John Singer Sargent painted Dyer's wife, Mary Anthony Dyer, which suggests that the couple may have been intimates of the artistic circle in Venice, where the young Sargent was then working.
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