Page 90 - Orient Collection

39. Fellah Women on the Edge of the NILE

Artist: François BARRY, French, (1813 - 1905)
Execution date (approximate): 1887
Téchnique: Oil on Canvas, (Signed lower right and dated)
Measures: 33 x 41 cm.
Description: The Palaces of the Fatimides of the 10th century, were of great attraction to
the painters visiting Egypt, and especially with the Fellahi poor people who had to go to
the edge of the Nile river to wash. Some Fellah women (village women) washing their
clothes and taking water at the edge of the Nile-Egypt. In the back are the Palaces of the
Fatimides (from the 10th. century).

Biography
Barry was a French painter born in Marseille. He studied painting at the atelier of Aubert in
Marseille, and at the atelier of Gudin and Isabey in 1840 in Paris. Since he lived in Marseille
he admired the port and the ships, and became a painter of marine landscapes. He was
not an official painter of the navy. He traveled to the Middle-East and to Egypt, where he
painted Orientalist scenes. He was an Orientalist, a painter of landscape, and a painter
of marines. Whilst he was studying in Paris, he obtained two medals as a reward for his
marines on Marseille attracting a lot of success. He then travelled to Egypt, accompanying
The Prince Jérôme Napoléon in an official mission in 1862-1863 (for the construction of
the Suez Canal), and Constantinople in Turkey. He painted Oriental scenes of daily life
in Assouan , the Nile, Cairo, Alexandria (1865), and oriental landscapes of Constantinople,
and Smyrne (Turkey).

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