Footnotes

• Renowned for his dynamic paintings of horses and battles, as well as masculine depictions of Arab warriors, Adolf Schreyer occupies a special place in the Orientalist genre. Schreyer was born in Germany, although he made his early reputation in Paris through landscape and military subjects. Receiving his training in Stuttgart, Munich and Dusseldorf, his lessons even included riding and horse anatomy. In the later 1840s, Schreyer was called to accompany Prince Thurn's regiment in the Crimean War where he travelled to through Turkey, Wallachia and Southern Russia as an official war artist. It was there that he learned to sketch soldiers with their horses and portray the action of battle.
  
  It was not until 1861 that Schreyer went to Algeria, Egypt and Syria, forming the foundation for his subsequent work as in the present lot. In North Africa, the artist utterly immersed himself in Bedouin life, mastering the Arab dialect and taking on the custom and dress of his hosts. Schreyer's favourite and most coveted scenes are those of Arabian warriors on horseback, riding abreast with their war flags and rifles held high. A sense of immediacy is conveyed in his use of free and rapid brush stroke. The celerity of the charging warriors is masterfully depicted by white punctuations in their full streaming battle regalia. The amorphous landscape in the background does not reveal where the restless figures ride or with whom they will fight. However Schreyer's affinity for the people and personal politics may suggest that this scene illustrates Arabs rushing to engage in the resistance against the French in Algeria. It was during this time that tribesmen waged war on the occupying forces under the banner of Islam and a newly minted nationalism.

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Category: Fine Art / Orientalist Art

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