64cm (25in) x 54cm (21in)
Oil on canvas. English School full length portrait of John Smith in the dress of an Idumaean Sheikh at Petra. Inscribed to an old label verso, ‘Presented to John Fleming, C.S.I., by John Wilson, D.D, Mr. Smith's companion in their Travels’. Canvas: 93cm (21in) x 43cm (17in). Contained in period birds eye maple frame.
Following in the footsteps of Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817) who was the first European to reach Petra in 1812, John Smith accompanied Dr John Wilson’s expedition to re-discover the world’s most famous example of rock-cut architecture in 1843. Wilson, who was destined to become Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in 1870, was an Orientalist and a missionary in India. Wilson and Smith considered it essential to disguise themselves as Arabs in an attempt to mitigate against the repeated robberies experienced by Burckhardt. An early photograph of Wilson by the Scottish pioneer photographer David Octavius Hill shows him in the heavily striped Arab robes similar to those depicted in the present painting.
The 9-man expedition accompanied by servants, and forty-seven camels set out from Cairo in 1843. After following what Wilson took to be the route of the Israelites to the parting of the Red Sea; ascending Mount Hor, and examining the tomb of Aaron, they descended into ‘the fearful chasm of Petra by moonlight’. The expedition led later that year to the publication of Wilson’s most notable work, The Lands of the Bible (1847).
Smith was one of four partners in Bombay trading house of William Nicol & Co which owned construction businesses, docks, wharves, warehouses and office buildings. Moreover Smith’s firm was a subsidiary of Smith Fleming & Co. in London, of which John Fleming CSI, recipient of the present portrait, was a principal. Both Nicol and Smith Fleming owed separate debts to the City of Glasgow Bank which famously failed in 1877. The collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank was the first time in British history any bank’s principal owners were sentenced to jail terms for lying about the condition of the bank’s finances. John Smith however had retired to England and lived at Mickleham Hall, Dorking, Surrey and 27 Princes Gate, London SW, before dying in 1871.
Sources:
Smith, G. (1878) The Life of John Wilson, DD, FRS, for Fifty Years Philanthropist and Scholar in the East, London (Murray)
Wilson, J. (1847) The Lands of the Bible Visited and Described, in an Extensive Journey Undertaken with Special Reference to the Promotion of Biblical Research and the Advancement of the Cause of Philanthropy, 2 vols. Edinburgh (Whyte)