Adolph Schreyer
German, 1828 - 1899Cavalier Arabe (Arab Horseman), ca. 1860
Not on view
Oil on canvas
Dimensions32 × 26 3/4 in.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Keith Davis, 1978.13
Adolph Schreyer is best known as a Romantic painter of exotic scenes and battles. Unlike his Orientalist contemporaries (artists who painted scenes of Middle-Eastern locales and their people), he is notable for eschewing the cruelty and savagery that was very prominent in this genre.
Schreyer was in the Crimean Peninsula by 1854, viewing and depicting scenes of the war that broke out there between Russia and Great Britain, France, and Turkey. After the war ended, he traveled to Syria and North Africa where he found other exotic subject matter for his paintings. He settled in Paris in 1862, but had to return to Germany due to the Franco-Prussian War. Schreyer continued to paint his beloved Orientalist subjects until his death in 1899.
