The Door of a Cafe at Cairo

With their attention to minute detail, Lewis’s Cairo genre scenes present themselves as realistic portrayals of everyday life in the city, where he lived for ten years. However, most of them are imaginative compositions that blend clichés of Middle Eastern culture with his own knowledge of the region, made after the artist’s return to London. This example shows Lewis’s distinctive watercolor technique, which favored the use of pure white and gouache (opaque watercolor) to create a rich image that rivaled the jewel-like depth of oil painting. These materials allowed him to capture tiny details, such as the individual features of the figures at the back of the café, enhancing the sense of observed realitity (2022).