LOT DETAILS

Materials:

12 albumen prints

Size Notes:

average; mounts (236 x 314mm.)

Description:

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Markings:

many captioned in Arabic and/or signed in the negative by Abd al-Ghaffar, some additional Arabic captions in ink on the image, most captioned in French on the mount

Condition:

some spotting and fading, mounts slightly bowed

Provenance:

Lucien Armand Viard (1857- after 1916), French naval officer, amateur photographer and close friend of the famous Orientalist Pierre Loti (pseudonym of Julien Viaud, 1850-1923), a fellow naval officer, amateur photographer and novelist. Loti was also a life-long friend of the photographer Jules Gervais-Courtellemont (1863-1931) who converted to Islam and went to in 1894 and who took a number of fine photographs in Mecca and Medina, some of which were reproduced in his book Mon Voyage à la Mecque (Paris: Hachette, 1896). It is uncertain how Viard acquired these photographs, but it may have been during his naval service, or perhaps more likely from his friend Pierre Loti or from Gervais-Courtellemont. Viard's own albums (which include personal letters from Pierre Loti to Viard), from which these photographs were extracted, are being offered in this sale as lot 276.