Mercedes Volait (dir.) Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum Abraham Thomas DOI: 10.4000/books.inha.4871 Publisher: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Picard Place of publication: Paris Year of publication: 2013 Published on OpenEdition Books: 5 December 2017 Serie: InVisu Electronic ISBN: 9782917902806 http://books.openedition.org Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 2013 Electronic reference THOMAS, Abraham. James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum In: Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle [online]. Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2013 (generated 18 décembre 2020). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/inha/4871>. ISBN: 9782917902806. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.inha.4871. This text was automatically generated on 18 December 2020. James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum 1 James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum Abraham Thomas AUTHOR'S NOTE For their invaluable assistance at various archives, I would like to thank staff at The Griffith Institute, Oxford; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London and staff at The National Archives, Kew. I am also grateful to Briony Llewellyn for sharing her notes on Wild with me, and for her helpful suggestions and encouragement. 1 In his recollections of the great Prussian expedition to Egypt and Nubia in the 1840s, Carl Richard Lepsius described James Wild as “a young architect, full of genius, [who] seeks with enthusiasm in the East a new field for the exercise of the rich and various gifts with which he is endowed”1.These words were praise indeed. However, other accounts reveal some of the early frustrations felt by this precocious, ambitious architect: “Although considered successful by his contemporaries, [Wild] was profoundly discontented with his work. He chafed at the various restrictions which in those days prevented the Gothic designer from following the leading characteristics of the style... Another cause for his discontent was the parsimonious expenditure on sculptured and coloured ornamentation, both of which he considered essential to the proper rendering of the Gothic style2.” 2 Having built six Gothic churches by the age of twenty six, it is significant that for his next building project – Christ Church in Streatham, south London – Wild collaborated with Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi, two men with extensive experience of travel in the Near East. Bonomi had spent ten years in Egypt as a salaried artist, and came home in 1834, the same year that Owen Jones returned from his ground-breaking studies of Islamic decoration at the Alhambra Palace. Wild was one of the subscribers to Jones’s seminal Alhambra publication, produced in parts between 1836 and 1845, thus coinciding with the period of the Christ Church project3. Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum 2 1. Johann Jakob FREY, L'expédition prussienne en Égypte, menée par Lepsius, au sommet de la pyramide de Khéops à Gizeh, le 15 octobre 1842, watercolour, coloured lithography. James Wild, wearing a turban, is standing behind the man waving his hat under the Prussian flag. Source: Berlin (Deutschland), Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung (SMPK). 3 Jones became Wild’s brother-in-law when in 1842 Jones married Wild’s sister Isabella. The two men became great friends, and it seems that they also shared many of the same opinions on design reform. Jones published his theories in the celebrated design sourcebook, The Grammar of Ornament4. It is interesting to note the following statement in Jones’s preface: “The principles discoverable in the works of the past belong to us; not so the results. It is taking the end for the means5.” 4 This elegant passage, summarising Jones’s disapproval of the “unfortunate tendency” towards copying and historicism, echoes the sentiments of a letter which Wild wrote one month after the consecration of Christ Church: “I object in the first place to the adopting [of] any style. This word style… seems to be the chief source of all our architectural failures. Those who can really appreciate what is beautiful in ancient architecture… know why it is in vain to imitate the more prominent features as a sort of decoration to new buildings without all the circumstances which created the architecture it is wished to imitate. We must study from all sources and adapt and apply our knowledge with invention, as our forefathers did, or we can but produce caricatures of their works6.” 5 Christ Church has been described as Early Christian in plan, Italian Romanesque in composition, Ottoman in its bay elevations, and Alhambresque, Mamluk, Sevillean, and Ancient Egyptian in its ornament7. This hybrid approach seems in keeping with Wild’s earlier statements, and hints at a restless mind exploring the thresholds between conventional style categories. Jones was responsible for the decorative scheme of the column capitals and apse which were executed with a liberal mix of Byzantine/Turkish and Alhambresque ornament. In 1840, Wild wrote to Bonomi asking for advice on the design for the church “which gets more Egyptian every day8”. 6 Bonomi was invited to join Lepsius’s Prussian expedition to Egypt after a chance encounter in the British Museum with the Prussian crown prince and Lepsius himself9. Wild was soon recruited as an architectural draughtsman for the expedition, doubtless encouraged by Jones, the supportive brother-in-law who had returned from his own Near Eastern travels only eight years previously. The group departed in 1842, with the objective of completing extensive surveys of Ancient Egyptian monuments (ill. 1). The surviving drawings by Wild from this period illustrate a clear aptitude for rigorous and sustained investigation10. Meticulously observed sketches of ceiling decoration, elaborate wall friezes and tomb details offer a tantalising promise of Wild’s later studies of Arab ornament in Cairo (ill. 2). Tellingly, Bonomi described Wild at this time as Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum 3 “dull” but “determined”11. An early indication of Wild’s interest in Islamic design presents itself in a sketchbook marked ‘Nile vol. II’ where, nestled amongst the usual Egyptological drawings, we find ten pages dedicated to sketches of ornament from mosques and private houses in “Girgeh” [Girga]. It is possible that this burgeoning curiosity was encouraged by the Egyptologist and Orientalist, Edward Lane. Wild, Bonomi and Lepsius were frequent visitors to Lane’s Cairo house. When Lane had first arrived in Egypt in the 1820s he lived exclusively in the Muslim areas of Cairo, learnt to speak Arabic fluently and adopted the “native” dress12. This desire to blend in with the local population pre-empts the strategy applied by Wild a number of years later in 1847 when he became the first Westerner to gain access to the Ummayyad Mosque in Damascus. Wild had obtained a decree from the Ottoman Porte granting an “inspection of the Great Mosque”13. The British Consul official in Damascus was “horrified” by the prospect of a “desecration of the sacred building by an infidel”, declaring that Wild’s tenacity would lead to “death at the hands of the Mohammedan custodians if discovered”. Not to be deterred, Wild forged ahead with his “Arabic language, native dress” and a “certain ascetic appearance” providing an “ample disguise” to enable the “gratification of seeing the Holy Place without exciting the slightest suspicion”. Wild took his leave of Lepsius in April 1844 and resolved to settle in Cairo, where for the next three years he dedicated himself to the study of Arabian architecture and decorative design. A letter written by Lane later that year, noting that Wild now seemed to be “more industrious”, attests to the renewed vigour with which Wild applied himself in this new branch of his Near Eastern studies14. Wild had also grown frustrated with the expedition, complaining to Bonomi that “[Lepsius] cares to talk about nothing that does not directly tend to be useful for himself”15. An account describing Wild’s residence in Cairo notes that “drawing in the East involves no inconsiderable amount of inconvenience, not to say danger, from the great suspicion of the natives of the use which may be made of their treasures”. It appears that Wild took many precautions when recording the Arab architectural details of Cairo: “What could not be done in the daytime had to be accomplished at night. From time to time in his wanderings he “marked in” the objects he desired to copy, prepared his damped paper for squeezes, and in the darkness set forth and obtained impressions with such perfect exactness of details as could not be obtained by drawing under an umbrella without intrusion16.” 7 While acknowledging Wild’s night-time heroics, we should not lose sight of the fact that his focus on domestic, secular architecture was a relatively rare and refreshing approach. As one of his protégés, Caspar Purdon Clarke, stated: [Wild]“cared more for dwellings of burgher people than for temples or palaces, and as these houses were selected for careful study on their merits rather than for their history, in his sketch-books an invaluable record has been preserved of domestic interiors, especially of Cairo and Damascus, which have long since been swept away before modern improvements17.” Le Caire dessiné et photographié au XIXe siècle James Wild, Cairo and the South Kensington Museum 4 2. Detail of a papyrus floral column from a shrine in Egyptian tomb; sketchbook drawing by James Wild, 1842-44. Source: Oxford (United Kingdom), Griffith Institute, University of Oxford (Wild MSS, II, Volume A, p.61).