Lot 1486: ARTHUR MELVILLE ARSA RSW ARS (SCOTTISH 1858 - 1904) - THE ABDUCTION

ARTHUR MELVILLE ARSA RSW ARS (SCOTTISH 1858 - 1904)
THE ABDUCTION
watercolour, signed and dated 1894
27cm x 45cm
Note : Melville's travels in Europe and the Middle East inspired his vibrant paintings in oil and watercolour. He developed a distinctive technique of watercolour painting, described as 'blottesque', using dabs of pigment on wet paper and blotting them with a sponge. Melville, born in Angus, studied painting in Edinburgh before moving to Paris in 1878. He gravitated to the artists' colony in Grez-sur-Long and sold the paintings he produced there to finance his journeys from North Africa to India. From around 1884 he worked closely with several of the Glasgow Boys in Scotland and in London, before his untimely death from typhoid.
"The story of a young headstrong English woman, scooped from the crowd by an Arab horseman at a riding display at Tangier, never to be seen again, and told in AJ Dawson's The Powder Play, (1898), is romantic fiction. It recalls the colourful tales of the Barbary Corsairs and anticipates Edith Maude Hull's desert romances of the inter-war period made popular in the films of Rudolph Valentino. Yet Dawson's story is nevertheless based upon a number of reported, albeit less glamorous kidnaps that occurred in the closing decades of the nineteenth century in a city that was increasingly controlled by local brigands.
Such tales would have been current during Arthur Melville's visits to the 'white city' in the 1890s and while he would record its narrow passageways, mosques and souk, he was also seeking material to use in larger compositions such as Waiting For the Sultan and A Moorish Procession, Tangier 1893 (both National Gallery of Scotland), that conveyed the colour of Arab life. One of these pictorial ideas is likely to have been The Abduction. It, more than any of Melville's Orientalist pictures contains memories of Delacroix, whose murals of Attila and Heliodorus in the Palais Bourbon and St Sulpice, Melville could have seen on his many visits to Paris. KMC.