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a painting of a group of people in a boat on the watera painting of a group of people in a boat on the waterpainting of a group of people sitting in a boat on a body of waterpainting of three people in a boat on a lake at nighta painting of a group of people in a boat on the watera picture of an old window with a wooden frame
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11 - Jean Jules LECOMTE du NOUY (Paris 1842 – Paris 1923) The Las…
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Estimate €20,000 - €30,000
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Jean Jules LECOMTE du NOUY (Paris 1842 – Paris 1923) The Last Turkish Patrols in Constantinople Original oil on canvas 72 x 112 cm Signed centre right and dated ‘Lecomte du Nouy 1913’ Bears on the reverse the stencil mark of the art dealer Hardy Allan in Paris *** Oil on canvas, signed centre right and dated (28⅜ × 44⅛ in.) Provenance Lecomte du Nouy Collection Private collection Exhibition 1913 Salon des Artistes Français, no. 1079 Related works Charles Gleyre (1806–1874), *Le Soir ou Les Illusions perdues*, 1843, oil on canvas, 156.5 × 238 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre (inv. INV10039) Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), The Prisoner, 1861, oil on panel, 45 × 78 cm, Nantes, Musée d’Arts (inv. INV990) Paris Salon, 1863; World’s Fair, 1867 Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Revised Monograph, Updated Catalogue Raisonné, Paris, 2000, nos. 134–135 Jean Jules Lecomte du Nouy, On the Bosphorus, oil on canvas, 6.3 × 11.7 cm — preparatory sketch for The Last Turkish Rounds, exhibited at the 1913 Salon, no. 1079; *Souvenirs de voyages*, Lecomte du Nouy, Han Gallery, October 1995, no. 20 in the catalogue Jean Jules Lecomte du Nouy, On the Bosphorus, oil on canvas, 26.3 × 13.4 cm — daytime version of the composition; Souvenirs de voyages, Lecomte du Nouy, Han Gallery, October 1995, catalogue no. 152 Bibliography Roger Diederen, *From Homer to the Harem: The Art of Jean Lecomte du Nouy (1842–1923)*, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2004; supplemented by a catalogue raisonné, no. 323, p. 214 The Last Turkish Rounds in Constantinople, exhibited at the 1913 Salon des Artistes Français, is a work of full artistic maturity. The nocturnal scene of silhouettes in a boat on the dark waters of the Bosphorus, lit only by the glow of a lantern, evokes a twilight Orient captured in its final hours. The work forms part of a tradition of nocturnal aquatic scenes exemplified by his master Gérôme in *Le Prisonnier* (1861, Nantes Museum of Art): the same treatment of artificial light on the water, the same tension between the subject’s apparent serenity and the gravity of the context. But it is above all the connection with Gleyre that stands out: *Le Soir* or *Les Illusions perdues* (1843) — a melancholic figure in a boat at night watching a vision drift away — offers the same visual rhetoric of departure and loss. In Lecomte du Nouy’s work, Gleyre’s poetic style is transformed into a document of the era: these are the final sentinels, the last patrols of a world in the throes of change. The creative process behind the work is evidenced by several surviving studies: a preparatory sketch (oil on canvas, 6.3 × 11.7 cm, no. 20 in the catalogue *Souvenirs de voyages*, Han Gallery, October 1995) and a daytime version of the same composition (oil on canvas, 26.3 × 13.4 cm, no. 152 in the same catalogue) bear witness to the artist’s prolonged reflection on this motif of the Bosphorus. Lecomte du Nouy initially tackled the scene in full light before opting for this nocturnal interpretation, endowing the final composition with its melancholic atmosphere and sense of twilight. The title itself invites a broader interpretation. Painted in 1913, a year in which the Ottoman Empire—gradually ousted from the Balkans in the wake of successive independence movements and shaken by the Young Turks’ coup d’état in Constantinople in January—seemed on the brink of collapse, the work might suggest, without stating it outright, the sense of a world in its twilight. These ‘last patrols’ would then be less a genre scene than a subtle metaphor: the last guards of a dying empire, watching over waters slipping from their grasp. Nothing in the sources allows us to attribute any explicit political intention to the artist; yet it is this ambiguity between a contemporary document and a meditation on the end of a world that gives the painting its particular resonance.
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