In the cool sanctuary of a courtyard in Damascus, a trio of girls pass the hot hours of midday. The older girl – handsome, auburn-haired and statuesque – is dressed in a glorious, voluptuous silk gown of pale green embroidered with gold. She pauses from tending her potted carnations and oleander to watch her companions who are knocking the ripe fruit from the uppermost boughs of a lemon-tree. She has slipped off her qutab (wooden shoes) to feel the cool, smooth marble beneath her bare feet and the informality and privacy of the scene has made her comfortable enough to unbutton her dress and roll up one of her sleeves to expose an ivory-white arm – exposure which would not have been tolerated beyond the confines of her home. Her hair is elaborately decorated with the fragrant star-shaped flowers of a white jasmine. The shape of the flowers is echoed in the forms of some of the beautiful mosaic decorations of the walls around her. The youngest girl is using the skirts of her blush-rose satin dress to hold the picked citruses. Her auburn hair suggests a familial relationship with the beautiful gardener but it is unclear whether she is a daughter or a sister. The darker skin and less opulent clothing of the third model is less ambiguous and clearly defines her as a servant within the house.

Leighton journeyed to Syria in autumn 1873, visiting Richard Burton and his wife Isobel at El Salahiyyah on the outskirts of the city of Damascus. As the retired British Consul, Burton would have been able to gain access to locations that Leighton might otherwise have not been permitted to see, including the courtyard depicted in the present painting. Burton has already assisted Leighton sourcing a large number of old tiles and items of inlaid and turned woodwork which Leighton was keen to buy as extravagant and inspiring souvenirs. As early as 1871 Burton had written to Leighton about finding Damascus tiles for him; ‘And now to business. I am quite as willing to have a house pulled down for you... But the difficulty is to find a house with tiles. The bric a brac sellers have quite learned their value and demand extravagant sums for poor articles. Of course you want good old specimens and these are waxing very rare... The fact is it is a work of patience. My wife and I will keep a sharp look out for you and buy up as many as we can find which seem to answer your description.’¹

Leighton’s visit to Syria in 1873 began with an uncomfortable journey on a Russian ship to Beirut, which Leighton described in a letter to his father dated 18 October 1873; ‘Three tedious days on board a Russian boat which tossed and rolled like a cork over a sea on which a P&O would have been motionless, brought.mes to Beyrout; a cheery, picturesque, sunny port at the foot of Lebanon; gay and glad I was to land, and Andrea's cool, clean inn overlooking the sea was a delightful haven of rest, and my first.mes al at a steady table (or a real chair) was ambrosial’. Although Leighton enjoyed his t.mes in Beirut he was keen to move on; ‘Being in a hurry to get to the end of my journey, I did not stay more than half a day, but started by diligence for Damascus, a journey of some thirteen hours, first over Lebanon itself (which is fine, but by no means grand as I had hoped), then across the Valley of Coelesyria, and lastly over Antilebanon), at the foot of which the town lies. At the last relay I found waiting for me a horse and dragoman, for which and whom I had telegraphed in order that I might get the famous view of Damascus about which travellers have told wonders from t.mes immemorial, and which is only to be seen from a bridle path over the hill above the suburb of Sala'aijeh; unfortunately the days are getting short, and I did not reach the proper spot till just after sunset; not too late, however, to enjoy the marvellous prospect before me, and to feel that it is worthy of all that has been said in its praise. It is impossible to conceive anything more startling than the suddenness with which, emerging from a narrow and absolutely barren cleft in the rock, you see spread before your eyes and at your feet a dense mass of exuberant trees spreading for miles on to the plain which looks towards Palmyra, and, rising white in the midst of it, the Damascus of the thousand and one nights. It is a great and rare thing for an old traveller not to be disappointed, and I am grateful that it has been so with me this t.mes ’.

In his letter to his father Leighton specifically mentioned the old homes in Damascus; ‘… some few are standing, though grey and perishing, and … are still lovely to enchantment.’² He made several sketches and commissioned at least four photographs of the older parts of Damascus. He explained to his father that these black-and-white images did not express;

While in Damascus Leighton was inspired to paint two scenes of importance, described in a letter; ‘I am doing a bit in the great mosque, which is very delightful to me, in colour, and, if I can render it, may strike others the same way. I am having the spot photographed in case I try to make a picture of it. The second… would probably be some unambitious corner of a court with a figure or two, et viola.’³ These pictures were the present interior and Portion of the Interior of the Grand Mosque of Damascus which could be regarded as depicting the way that women inhabited the more public places in Damascus – shrouded from view. The informality of the women in the more successful painting Old Damascus, shows that Leighton was more comfortable with depicting this genre of subject rather than the austerity of the sterner religious aspects of Syrian life.

Old Damascus gives us a rare insight into the interior splendour of the old merchants' houses. The courtyard has been entered through a small wooden ante-chamber with no handle on the inside – the courtyard was space only accessible to those who were admitted by the residents within. Leighton therefore gives us a scene of great intimacy and seclusion. He probably combined elements from several buildings into his painting and used some artistic licence – this was not intended to be a literal depiction of a specific place. However the architecture of the courtyard with its distinctive polychrome striped walls, known in Syrian as ablaq, has been identified as the Barrani courtyard of Beit Farhi, the vast home of the Sephardic Jewish Farhi family located off Al-Amin Street. The house was originally commissioned by Raphael Farhi (1774-1846), a wealthy banker and powerful official in the Ottoman empire. Although few would have guessed the opulence and beauty of the interiors from the unassuming doorway to the street, Beit Farhi was a series of exquisitely designed courtyards and reception rooms large enough to house over fifty members of the extended Farhi family. Behind the woman in green in Leighton’s painting is the iwan, an arcade of arches forming a shaded open-sided reception room which faced north to avoid the heat of the midday sun. Abandoned and neglected Beit Farhi fell into disrepair until the early twenty-first century but has now been restored to its former glory as a jewel of Damascene architecture.

One of Leighton’s friends in Damascus recalled that the artist had made several shopping excursions to buy Damascene gowns; ‘we got access to several stores of gold-embroidered fabrics and costly oriental robes that had been torn from Christian ladies and Leighton returned to his hotel laden with cost.mes s and cloths of silver and gold of the greatest artistic value.’⁴ The models for the painting are clearly not Middle Eastern, but Leighton avoided the erotic suggestion of depicting European women in settings that could be interpreted as harems. Damascus was a city well-known for its hospitality towards tourists and British diplomats, merchants and adventurers, who moved with their wives and families to live in the city. Two red-haired girls in Damascus may have been unusual but not unheard of.

Old Damascus was the first of Leighton’s pictures inspired by the cost.mes and decoration of homes in the Near-East. In 1877 he painted two more similar interiors, Music Lesson and Study: At a Reading Desk both of which depict the child model Connie Gilchrist dressed in a very similar gown that she appears to be wearing in Old Damascus. In Music Lesson, the colour of the dress is pale turquoise rather than rose pink. Connie is wearing the gown over voluminous silk trousers in both pictures and the same cost.mes appears in Light of the Harem painted circa 1880. Constance ‘Connie’ Macdonald Gilchrist appealed to Leighton’s paternal nature in the same way that the Dene sisters did in the next decade. She was born in 1865, the daughter of an engineer from the East-end of London. She was eight when she modelled for Old Damascus and for several of the singing choristers in Leighton’s greatest work of this period The Daphnephoria (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). She also posed for Whistler, Lewis Carroll and William Powell Frith but her career as an artist’s model began to wane towards the end of the 1870s when she pursued a career on the stage. Her first known performance was in 1873 at the Drury Lane Theatre where she played the Prince of Mushrooms in Jack in a Box. She was a regular, popular and successful actress throughout the 1870s and when she was twelve she had also expanded her repertoire by having a skipping-rope act at the Gaiety Theatre. She became the mistress of Lord Lonsdale who died in 1882 at the house that he had purchased for her, causing a minor scandal. In July 1892 she married the wealthy Edmund Fitzmaurice, 7th Earl of Orkney. She put her impoverished childhood and her modelling, acting and dancing days behind her and became Countess Orkney, living a happy and undisturbed life in the countryside in Buckinghamshire; she died in 1946 after fifty-three years of marriage.

The lemon-tree in Old Damascus recalls the famous drawing that Leighton had made fifteen years earlier, a beautifully detailed silverpoint study which took Leighton several weeks to complete in Capri in 1859. Lemon trees also appear in The Painter’s Honeymoon of 1863-4 (Museum of Replica Handbags s, Boston), The Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana of 1865-6 (private collects ion), Acme and Septimus of circa 1868 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Potted oleanders appear in several of the oil sketches of courtyards in Capri made on the same visit and also appear in Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence of 1854-5 (collects ion of HRH Queen Elizabeth II, on loan to the National Gallery, London). When Leighton painted The Garden of the Hesperides in 1892 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) the trio of flora that accompanies the trio of women are jasmine, oleander and lemon – as they had done in Old Damascus painted two decades earlier.

Old Damascus was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1874 and was much praised among Leighton’s fellow exhibitors and the critics. The artist John Evan Hodgson wrote to Leighton to congratulate him on the success of his pictures in that year's exhibition; ‘The women and the dear little girl in the courtyard… will outlive all the ‘Clytemnestras,’ and co.; they live with blood in their veins, the others are but galvanised corpses.’ The critic for The Art Journal felt that Old Damascus demonstrated the differences between Leighton’s work and that of John Everett Millais which was; ‘a vision of things [that was] rather quick and decisive, than profound and considered’ whilst Leighton’s work was seen to have ‘a definite aim and ideal in his work. His delight in the world about him depends always upon his perception in natural things of the possibilities of new forms of artistic expression… All nature is simply regarded as the material of Art, to be used as there may be need, and as the artist may find himself able to bring it within the scope of his design. Thus in Mr Leighton’s method there is a process of abstraction and refinement.'⁵ Of the four pictures by Leighton exhibited that year The Art Journal was unequivocal in its preference for Old Damascus, which ‘must take high rank among the many designs of beauty with which Mr Leighton has helped to raise the character of English Art… it is a rare pleasure to meet with a painting where the harmony is so complete as here.'⁶

Leighton’s visit to Damascus and subsequent visits to Spain and Sicily were to inspire one of the most remarkable interiors of Victorian London, the Arab Court designed by George Aitchison for Leighton’s studio house in Holland Park. In 1871 Burton had promised Leighton that he would keep an eye out for old tiles and although he left Damascus in 1873 in 1876 he managed to secure a large consignment of tiles taken from the Tomb of Sakhar on the Indus. Along with tiles purchased around the same t.mes by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, Leighton and Aitchison set about building an interior courtyard and fountain to display the tiles. Between 1877 and 1879 Aitchison built an architectural extravaganza of glittering tiles, aided by Walter Crane who was commissioned to fill in the areas not occupied by old tiles which were arranged in place by William de Morgan. The design of the room was loosely based upon La Zisa in Palermo but it was not intended to be a recreation, or even faithful to Arabic designs – it was a beautiful and exotic fantasy in which Leighton could express his taste and impress the many eminent guests who marveled around the babbling fountain. It was described in 1883 as ‘quite the 8th wonder of the world, including a Moorish cupola place, with a fountain, all lined with precious tiles and mosaics by Walter Crane, as good almost as a Ravenna church; Sir Frederick is a mixture of the Olympian Jove and a head waiter, a superb decorator and a superb piece of decoration….’⁷ The tiles and columns of the Arab Hall along with Leighton’s collects ions of cost.mes s brought back from his travels, inspired several more paintings including The Light of the Harem of circa 1880 which like Old Damascus contrasts a child model with an older girl who is aware of her own elegance and beauty. In 1908, Old Damascus was reproduced in Alfred Baldry’s biography of Leighton and singled out for praise; ‘Few of Leighton's paintings of Eastern subjects illustrate better than this one the certainty and precision of his draughtsmanship and his power of dealing with architectural details. But this "Old Damascus—Jews' Quarter" – as it was called when it was first exhibited in 1874 – is much more than a simple study of architecture; it sums up many of the artist's best qualities as a craftsman and a shrewd observer of Nature.’⁸

Old Damascus was acquired either at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1874 or soon afterwards, by Henry bings ham Mildmay (1828-1905). In that year Mildmay acquired at auction one of Leighton’s greatest pictures, the magnificent The Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana of 1866 (private collects ion) from the collects ion of the shipping magnate Frederick Richard Leyland. Mildmay had inherited a taste for picture collects ing from his father Humphrey Mildmay (1794-1853) and also his mother Anne, who was from the great banking family of Baring which owned one of the most prestigious art collects ions in Britain. Through the late 1870s and 1880s Mildmay purchased a superb collects ion of his own, of modern pictures and Old Masters, making significant purchases at the Hamilton Palace sale in 1882 and at the Blenheim sale at Christie's in 1886. His collects ion included masterpieces by many of the greatest Dutch seventeenth century artists, Rembrandt, de Koninck, Hobbema, Ruisdael, Steen and examples by Guardi, Reynolds, de Hooch and others. In October 1890 Mildmay’s collects ing was brought to an abrupt end with the Baring crisis which decimated his wealth; his beautiful Devon country house at Flete which had been built in 1878 by Richard Norman Shaw was let and in the summer of 1893 a substantial part of Mildmay's picture collects ion was sold. Old Damascus was not among the pictures sold at the Mildmay sale and passed to his son Francis bings ham Mildmay, 1st Baron Mildmay of Flete (1861-1947), along with The Syracusan Bride and other significant Old Master paintings. Many of Lord Mildmay’s pictures were sold discreetly after his death and it is not known when Old Damascus was sold. However it is likely that it was in 1947 when The Syracusan Bride and another painting by Leighton, The Widow’s Prayer (Cecil French Bequest, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea) were both sold from the Mildmay estate. By the 1980s Old Damascus was in the less salubrious collects ion of the Taxation Publishing Company which had been founded in 1932 – a sign of the decline in the reputation of Victorian art in the mid twentieth century. It then entered the collects ion of Frederick Koch, the American philanthropist and Anglophile who was one of the most avid but discerning collects ors of Victorian art in the 1980s and 1990s. It changed hands once more in 1993 and was bought by another American collects or.

In 1996 Old Damascus was included in the exhibition held to celebrate the centenary of Leighton’s death, and returned to the Royal Academy 122 years after it had first graced the walls. In the catalogue, Richard Ormond recognised the changes in how Leighton’s work had been viewed in the past; 'Leighton's reputation has suffered for much of this century from the prejudice against Victorian art in general and academic art in particular... People can now enjoy his pictures for their formal qualities without rejecting either their subject-matter or their method... He was an artist who worked with extreme care and precision... His is an art in which things are not left to chance or improvisation, but it is not one which, therefore, lacks either feeling or life. The best of Leighton's painting is charged with poetic sensibility and emotion, for all its smoothness of form and composure of design.'⁹

The painting is contained in its original frame, made by Foord & Dickinson of London, probably to Leighton's design.

¹ MS letter dated 22 March 1871 from Burton to Leighton, Leighton House Archive.

² Barrington 1906, vol. II, p. 208.

³ Ibid.

⁴ W. Wright, ‘Lord Leighton at Damascus and After’, The Bookman, London 1896, p. 184.

⁵ The Art Journal, 1874, p. 166.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ I. Cooper-Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters, London 1937, p. 123.

⁸ Baldry 1908, p. 24.

⁹ Jones, Newall, Ormond, Ormond and Read 1996, p. 21.