Footnotes

Provenance
Hugh Lee Patterson.
Julia Boyd.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 10 December 1952, lot 12.
With J. Leger & Son, London (as by David Roberts).
Acquired by the father of the present owner in 1954 and thence by descent.
Private collection, UK.

Exhibited
London, Tate Britain, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 4 June-31 August, 2008.

Literature
Exh. cat., Tate Britain, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, London, 2008, fig. 149, pp. 170-171, illustrated.

Lewis arrived in Constantinople in October 1840 and spent around a year in the city before travelling on to Egypt where he would settle in Cairo for his well-documented residence of nearly a decade. Travelling from Rome through Albania, Corfu, Janina, the Pindus Mountains, Patrass, Athens, the Gulf of Corinth and Smyrna and ultimately reaching Constantinople, Lewis's journey made him a central figure of British Orientalist painting along with David Roberts who was touring Egypt and the Holy Land at a similar time, in fact the present lot was, at one point in its history, falsely ascribed to Roberts.

Lewis would likely have formed some idea of the architecture and atmosphere of Constantinople while working on the publication of Lewis's Illustrations of Constantinople: Made During a Residence in That City in the Years 1835-6 (the residence referred to in the title was not Lewis's, but John Richard Coke Smyth's and Lewis up his illustrations from Coke Smyth's sketches), published in 1838, however the impact of seeing the Hagia Sophia in person for the first time must have been profound. The current structure was built during the reign of Emperor Justinian between 523-537 A.D. and stood as the largest cathedral in the world for nearly one thousand years. Following the Ottoman conquest for Constantinople in 1453 edifice then became a mosque and in subsequent years the four minarets were added and the Christian mosaics preserved under a layer of plaster.

In the mid-nineteenth century the mosque remained one of the most prominent buildings in the city and as Lewis's artistic focus at the time was on the religious architecture of Constantinople, he was naturally drawn to it. Fascinated by the rich cultural heritage of the city he delighted in the opportunity to see the ancient sites and accompanied Lady Londonderry (wife of the third Marquis of Londonderry whose portrait Lewis later painted) on her tour of the city's mosques. An official permit (firman) was needed for Westerners to enter the mosques and the few which were granted were usually given to visitors of status, so it is quite possible that the present work was completed during this tour.

Once inside it is clear Lewis relished the chance to record what appeared before him and did so with great, skill, accuracy and consideration. The intricate interior design and structure of the building is carefully reproduced in delicate pencil which Lewis adds to with sparing use of colour to bring the scene to life and draw attention to key architectural elements. The cluster of small, seated figures and one standing, gazing up to the speaker, create a sense of vast interior space, emphasizing the buildings size but also its function. When compared to Lewis's other, similar mosque interiors from the same period the present composition ranks as one of the fullest, not only architecturally, but in terms of colour and number of figures. A similar interior study of the Hagia Sophia, albeit of a different aspect, can be found in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (Interior of the Mosque of Aya Sofya, Istanbul, no. SD.582). (For two further comparable works see The Interior of the Mosque of Santa Sophia, Constantinople, Sotheby's, Important British Pictures, 24 November 2005, lot 169 and Interior of Sultanahmet Camii (The Blue Mosque), Constantinople, Sotheby's, The Orientalist Sale, 19 April 2016, lot 4).