Aloysius O'Kelly (1853-1936)
The Gate of Bab Zuwayla
Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 52.5cm
Signed and inscribed 'Cairo'

 

From childhood, Aloysius OKelly lived and breathed a mixture of art and political...

Aloysius O'Kelly (1853-1936)
The Gate of Bab Zuwayla
Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 52.5cm
Signed and inscribed 'Cairo'

 

From childhood, Aloysius OKelly lived and breathed a mixture of art and political sedition in Ireland, Britain, France, and the United States, as well as outposts of empire such as Sudan and Egypt. In 1883, he and his brother James were drawn into the vortex of violence surrounding the Mahdi in Sudan, James as war correspondent for the Daily News and Aloysius as illustrator for the Pictorial World.

 

OKellys illustrations of the jihad in Sudan were part of a plan to thwart Britain in Ireland. By distracting Britain overseas, they sought to destabilise the coloniser in Ireland.

 

The conventions of Orientalism were problematic for OKelly, because he was bound by them aesthetically, but resistant politically. OKelly subverted the insidious representation of the East as exotic by rendering it ordinary. The Egyptian stereotype was of an unreasonable, superstitious, ignorant, indolent, sexually incontinent, deceitful and dirty people in need of civilising by their colonial masters (much like the Irish). Indeed, there are ethnographic continuities between OKellys North African and Irish paintings, as manifest in his Mass in a Connemara Cabin and The Harem Guard.

 

This painting was executed in the mid 1880s. It shows the Bab Zuwayla gate in Cairo.1 The old city was divided into quarters, separated by gates, manned by porters. On the left, the ever-present donkey and donkey-boy, and on the right, the watercarrier, pass through. While OKelly, and his master, the Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, shared an interest in ethnographic realism, OKelly was clearly concerned with modern Cairo as it was rather than as its colonial masters thought it was, or should be a benign view of a stigmatised setting.

 

OKellys topographical competence is undeniable; the red and white coursed stone work, the deep shadows and bright sunlight attest to his skills as an enchanting urban portraitist. But Cairo in the 1880s was a tinder box, a source of great anxiety to the colonial authorities. The savage repression of the Egyptian nationalist movement had created massive social problems the narrowness of the streets may have kept the inhabitants cool in the heat, but there were political consequences for a population packed together.

 

This has the initial appearance of a highly finished painting, evident in the detailed treatment of the architecture, but on closer inspection the brushstrokes are looser, more vibrant and gestural than one associates with conventional Orientalist painting.

 

Prof. Niamh OSullivan

 

1. I am grateful to Prof. Bernard OKane at the American University in Cairo, for identifying the location

 

View more View less