Bida was a student of Delacroix, and in the 1840’s and ‘50’s he made numerous journeys to eastern countries, becoming a famous Orientalist in the process. He also produced drawings of biblical subjects. He began exhibiting his distinctive black-and-white drawings at the Salons from 1847, and was also esteemed as a lithographer and illustrator. Bida was made a Chavalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1855.
This drawing, executed solely in black, white and gray tones, is a typical example of Bida’s oeuvre. As Baudelaire wrote, the artist “seems to have stoically repudiated color and all its pomps in order to give more value and light to the human character which his pencil undertakes to express.” In a similar vein, the Goncourt brothers likened Bida’s drawing style to lithography. Almost all his entries for the Salons, which were extremely well-received during the period 1857-1867, were black-and-white drawings.
The oriental theme of this sheet is another Bida hallmark. Like other famous orientalists, such as Decamps and Marilhat, he drew inspiration from his own travels. According to an anonymous writer in Eign Haard (who blithely repeated the story given by Bida’s biographer in a French article), the artist spent much of his life in the Orient, “traelling on horseback through Syria and Palestine, living with Arabs…and absorbing all things eastern.” The truth is more prosaic. Bida visited Constantinople in 1843, Egypt in 1850 and in 1755 he toured a number of countries, including Palestine (today Israel). He evidently struck on the idea for these chess players in Egypt because in 1859 he submitted a Salon work entitled Corps de garde d’Arnautes au Caïre, in which they formed the central group. That drawing is now lost, but fortunately a nineteenth-century photographic reproduction in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris made it possible not only to place the Fodor sheet in its proper context, but also to identify the subject. The soldiers are Arnauts, Albanians serving in the Turkish army, who are whiling away idle time in a Cairo guardroom with a game of chess. The photograph shows the guardroom in its entirety.
Chesneau described Bida in his review of the 1859 Salon as one of the pioneers of “peinture etnographique”, and gave a detailed description of the scene. “M. Bida’s drawing shows Arnaut soldiers passing their leisure hours as best they can in a guardroom. The walls of the lofty vault, which rests on large stone pillars, are adorned with arms of every kind. The Arnaut, in their picturesque garb, are divided into several groups. Some are playing chess, while others are smoking and drinking coffee…A few are conversing with women who are nonchalantly stretched out on the floor, heedless of the weighty matter being discussed by the latter group…M. Bida is a master of the pencil.”
The five soldiers in the Amsterdam drawing are identical to the central group in the Salon work, with the exception of the second figure on the right. Intead of the stern, erect warrior wearing a loose head-covering there is a seated man in a turban. There are also minor variations in the attributes. Long Turkish pipes and knives worn in the beld appear in both drawings, but in the Fodor sheet there is an Arab firelock propped against the wall on the right, and a narghile in the left foreground.
It is not known how this drawing came into Fodor’s possession. There do not appear to have bee any drawings by Bida on the Dutch market at the time when Fodor was forming his collection, nor did the artist submit any entries to the Dutch exhibitions of Works by Living Masters. In 1874, long after Fodor’s death, he sent a drawing for the Amsterdam exhibition which was priced at dfl. 70 and the Fodor sheet. In 1979 another drawing of chess-playing Arnauts done in the same black and white technique surfaced in Paris. Bida also made lithographs of Arnauts for two albums, L’Orient pittoresque and Souvenirs d’Egypte (1841-1852).
The motif of the game of chess or draughts and the use of the Arnaut as an Oriental “type” also appeared in works by other artists of the period. One such example was painted by Gérôme in 1859, The draught players (London, Wallace Collection).
( Wiepke Loos)
