“An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child” is a life-sized painting of a farmer’s wife carrying her sleeping child on her shoulders. It is an intimate slice of life scene expressed by the French painter Painter Léon Bonnat amid a phase of transition and expansion in Egyptian history.
The canvas depicts a female “fellah” (a peasant or farmer in Arabic-speaking regions), clothed in an obsidian “galabeya” (a long, flowing, loose garment made of lightweight fabric suitable for agricultural labor), with her eyes closed, bearing the weight of her naked child. An extension of the mother’s garment is draped over the top half of the child’s face, obscuring his eyes.
The Artist Behind the Scene
Léon Bonnat was born in 1833 in Bayonne, France. He lived in Madrid from 1846 to 1853, years that were especially significant in his artistic genesis. While Bonnat’s official training began in the Madrid studio of Federico Madrazo (of the legendary Madrazo painting dynasty), his true formation took place in the Museo del Prado, where the young painter spent his days copying the works of Diego Velázquez, Jusepe de Ribera, Titian, and Anthony van Dyck.
Bonnat’s career may be broadly thought of in two segments. The first part of his oeuvre consists of genre scenes, religious scenes, and historical subjects. “An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child,” finished in 1870, is one of the last genre scenes Bonnat created before moving on to painting only portrait commissions.
Around 1870, Bonnat began painting primarily commissioned portraits, becoming the leading portraitist in France. His sitters included a number of the presidents of the Third Republic, including Adolphe Thiers; writer Victor Hugo, and scholar Ernest Renan.
The lessons Bonnat learned from the Old Masters are present in “An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child,” originally called “Egyptian Fellah Woman and Child.” There is a clear value hierarchy at work in the composition. Middle values make up the tonal background, while the contrast of highest and lowest values is saved for the figures, creating a spotlight effect on the dyad. The highest values are saved for the skin of the mother and child, juxtaposed with the ivory black of the fabric enveloping them.
The Opening of the Suez Canal
Bonnat created the composition based on sketches he made from life at the grand opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal in 1869. The inauguration of the Suez Canal, which ushered in a new era of global trade and connectivity, transforming Egypt’s national identity, began at Port Said on the evening of Nov. 17, 1869. Celebratory entertainment included fireworks, dervishes, folk dances, fire-eaters, Karagoz shadow play, and the Khedive Isma’il Pasha of Egypt and Sudan (the viceroy to the Ottoman emperor) hosting a banquet on his yacht.
Amid the cacophony of spectacle, rather than painting the explosive color and motion of the opening ceremonies, Bonnat memorialized a private, inward moment. As a poignant, sensitively rendered portrait of mother and child, the canvas also conveys the complexities of the historical moment embodied in the opening of the Suez Canal. “An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child” is thus not merely a portrayal of rural life by an outsider, it carries an amplified sense of pathos against the backdrop of expansion that the waterway enabled.
The newly forged connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea had significant effects on the globalization of trade, commerce, travel, and local culture. The canal facilitated easier and faster transportation of goods between Europe and Asia, leading to increased trade opportunities for Egypt. It provided employment for thousands of Egyptians and exposed them to European technologies and engineering methods. As the canal became a focal point for international trade and travel, cultural exchange between Egypt and the rest of the world increased.
The Fellah Woman and Lady Liberty
The 19th century brought about a special interest in faraway lands, culminating in the Orientalist movement, which artistically explored the cultures, people, and landscapes of North Africa and the Middle East. Prominent among the Orientalist painters were Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). Marià Fortuny, the son-in-law of Federico Madrazo (Bonnat’s earliest painting mentor), also established himself as an Orientalist painter, no doubt adding his more exotic aesthetic tastes to the ethos of the Madrazo studio.
The fellah woman became an Oriental artistic type that embodied the values and sentiments of a dwindling way of life that would soon be subsumed by modernity. She was romanticized as a figure of nostalgia, an untainted beauty who represented the innocence, vulnerability, and naturalism of a more primitive era.
Perhaps the most well-known rendition of the woman fellah is that of French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. In his early 20s, Bartholdi traveled throughout Egypt, observing and making sketches of fellaheen. The sculptor created a prototype for the monumental neoclassical sculpture “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia,” which was meant to be placed in the Suez harbor, greeting those entering Egypt.
Although “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia” never came to fruition, Bartholdi channeled the lessons he learned from creating that prototype into his designs for “Liberty Enlightening the World.”
Bartholdi used the fellah’s features to guard a slower, less self-conscious time, turning the farmer’s wife into a primeval symbol of nostalgia and tradition. Bonnat, too, used his brushstrokes to convey the timelessness of the mother-child relationship, juxtaposed against a historical moment awash in change.
