Sun Dappled Entrance, Egypt, Eric Pape

Exhibition Label: "Empire of Things," 2013, Kate Meyer Pape studied in San Francisco, Paris, and Germany before spending two years in Egypt beginning in 1891. Guided by a local, Pape spent nine months adventuring by camel through Egypt, even camping one night on the Great Pyramid of Giza, tethered to the pyramid’s sloping surface. Rather than depicting such ancient marvels, however, Sun Dappled Entrance features a wall consisting of alternating rows of white and red stone. This stone-laying technique, so prominent in Islamic architecture, is termed ablaq. The technique is typical of Mamluk period (1250-1517) building, and examples of it can be seen throughout Cairo, where Pape lived and worked. Pape demonstrates an aesthetic appreciation for this locale, as seen in his attention to the transient play of light on the hard stone of the Islamic edifice. This contrasts with the orientalizing tendencies of his European contemporaries, who emphasized the “strange” foreigness of Egypt’s places and people over the formal possibilites of its landscape. Archive Label 1999: After training as an artist in San Francisco and Paris, Pape lived for a year with peasants in Northern Germany and then spent two years in Egypt. He traveled along the Nile, visited the Sahara Desert, and slept on the great pyramid, tied down so as to avoid rolling off. When he returned to the United States, he worked as an artist and illustrator in New York, and then moved to Boston where he established the Eric Pape School of Art in 1898. In Sun Dappled Entrance, Egypt Pape captures the appearance of the doorway to a courtyard using compositional techniques that direct the viewer's eye across the threshhold into the courtyard while also calling attention to the warm sunlit bricks and decorative cartouches and inscriptions around the door. Pape's life suggests an adventurous spirit and his paintings evoke a strikingly direct experience of the environment.