Before a Mosque (Cairo)

Before a Mosque (Cairo) from 1868 is one of Decamps's very late works, painted the year before his death in a riding accident and showing him still engaged with the Egyptian and Islamic architectural subjects that had interested him throughout his career. Egypt had fascinated European artists and intellectuals since Napoleon's campaign of 1798, and Cairo's mosques were among the most reproduced images in the Orientalist visual canon. Decamps never visited Egypt — his 1828 journey took him to Turkey — but he engaged with Egyptian subjects through secondary sources, the accounts of contemporaries such as Prosper Marilhat and Horace Vernet, and his deep familiarity with Islamic architectural forms observed in Turkey. The Hermitage Museum's acquisition of this late work reflects the strong Russian market for French Romantic painting in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Painted on panel rather than canvas, this late work shows Decamps working with the controlled, precise technique that panel support encourages. The architectural subject allowed him to combine his feeling for geometric form with the atmospheric light effects — dappled sun on stonework, deep shadow under arches — that define his best work.