The Cellist

The American expatriate Edwin Lord Weeks, like many nineteenth-century European artists, was known for his “exotic” North African and Middle Eastern subjects. However, he also undertook paintings based on three extended visits to India (in 1882, 1886, and 1892). In these works, Weeks’s talent for the dynamic transcription of brilliant light and color allowed him to represent foreign subjects in a picturesque way that appealed to Western audiences. Here, he offered the colorful, if weathered, tiled facade of a mosque as a diverting counterpoint to the subject of two armed men in conversation with an old man in a dhoti (a traditional Indian garment).