The Artist: In 1810, when Horace Vernet executed this portrait, he was twenty or twenty-one years of age: too old to be considered a prodigy and still in the shadow of the celebrated family of artists from which he came, foremost among them his father, Carle Vernet, and both his grandfathers, Joseph Vernet and Jean-Michel Moreau. Horace competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1809, and he may have tried again in 1810. He would debut at the Paris Salon in 1812 with five paintings featuring Napoleonic themes, which established his reputation as a leading painter of modern military subjects. As regimes came and went, Vernet managed to glorify the French state for the rest of his career.
The Painting: This is among the earliest known pictures by Vernet that is securely dated. As a direct likeness, it exhibits all the painterliness and agility for which the artist was renowned. Neither the sitter’s identity, nor the immediate circumstances behind the sitting, nor the painting’s early history has come to light. Nevertheless, it is possible to outline the historical context in which it was made. Little more than a decade earlier, in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte led an army to conquer Egypt for France. Since 1517, Egypt had been governed by the Mamluks, a warrior caste who ruled the country as a largely autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. Mamluks did not perpetuate their hold on power dynastically, through procreation. Instead, they replenished their ranks through the enslavement of Christian boys from the northern hinterlands of the Ottoman world, notably, though not exclusively, from the Balkans and Caucasus. These youths were converted to Islam and trained as soldiers.
Mamluks and Mamelouks: The French administration exploited power dynamics and jealousies between the Mamluks and the diverse populations they governed. Napoleon began to incorporate Middle Easterners, including some former Mamluk attendants, into French forces while still in Egypt. In time, some Muslim mounted men and actual Mamluks changed allegiance and joined the French. This led to the creation, on July 7, 1800 (after Napoleon's departure from Egypt), of the
1er Regiment de Mamelouks à Cheval, also known as the
Régiment des Mamelouks de la République. After the French were ousted from Egypt by British forces in 1801, some leaders of the French Mamelouk regiments in Egypt followed Napoleon’s
Armée de l’Orient back to France with their families. Other Middle Easterners who collaborated with the French, including Copts and other Christians, but also Muslims, sought refuge in France as well. One hundred fifty of the recently arrived men were formed into an
Escadron de Mamelouks, initially serving under General Jean Rapp (1771–1821). They were called Mamelouks, misleadingly, since many of them had recently been antagonized by Mamluks. (In this text,
Mamluk designates the transliteration of the Egyptian term, while
Mamelouk is the French spelling of the French imperial fighting force.)
Mamelouks were easily distinguishable by their uniforms. Although the uniforms changed somewhat over time, the turban, loose-sleeved shirt, Greek-style vest, and accessories seen in Vernet’s portrait were standard features.[1] The theatricizing of these men by means of their dress instantly made them a part of Napoleonic lore, sparking a vogue for “Oriental” costume in France (see The Met
2019.21) from the moment they first paraded in Paris on July 14, 1802. By 1808, French-born soldiers had begun to join the Mamelouks, and, from 1809, their ranks were augmented by French-born and immigrant soldiers alike.
The majority of Mamelouks were incorporated into the 10th squadron of the
Chasseurs de la Garde Impériale, whose most indelible image is
The Charging Chasseur, an early masterpiece by Théodore Gericault (1812, Musée du Louvre, Paris). He and the slightly older Horace became fast friends after the former joined Carle Vernet’s studio in the fall of 1808. In time, Gericault would make a portrait similar to the present one, thought by some scholars to represent his own devoted servant Mustapha (ca. 1822, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon).
A Confusing Inscription: Vernet signed and dated the present canvas, and signed it once again on the stretcher, where another name is inscribed as well: “Roustam.” Thus, the painting was, for many years, identified as a portrait of the most famous of the immigrants from Egypt, Roustam Raza.[2] Raza was born about 1781, in Tbilisi, Georgia. He was presented by sheikh Khalil El-Bakri (d. 1808/9) of Cairo as a gift to Napoleon, together with the Arabian stallion whose groom he was. Raza served as Napoleon’s personal bodyguard until 1814. He died at Dourdan, some twenty miles southwest of Paris, in 1845. Yet Vernet’s sitter does not resemble the portrait of Raza by Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert (1771–1849) exhibited at the Salon of 1806 (Musée de l’Armée, Paris, 3659), which served as the model for all subsequent depictions of him.[3] One possible explanation for the inscription on The Met picture is that it refers to another man named Roustam, but the name does not appear otherwise in rolls of the Mamelouk squadron. The identification may also be apocryphal, if not wishful. Whoever he was, the same man evidently sat for another portrait about the same time.[4] Art historian Anne Lafont has noted that Paillot de Montabert’s portrait of Raza served as the prototype for other portrayals of Mamelouks produced in Parisian artists’ studios during the First French Empire.[5]
The Fate of Mamluks and Mamelouks: The Mamelouks served Napoleon until the fall of the First French Empire, in 1814–15. The Albanian-born viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769–1849), assassinated most of the remaining Egyptian Mamluks
en masse in the Citadel of Cairo in 1811.
Asher Ethan Miller 2014; revised 2022
[1] The later history of the Mamluks and the related history of the Mamelouk squadron is complicated and often muddied through oversimplification. See Jean Brunon and Raoul Brunon,
Les Mameluks d’Egypte: Les Mameluks de la Garde Impériale, Marseilles, 1963. The Brunons’ account is broadly contextualized in the illuminating study by Ian Coller,
Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831, Berkeley, 2011, p. 59 and throughout. Coller traces the roots of refugees within Egypt as well as the frustrations and successes they experienced following their arrival in France, arguing that they constituted the origins of today’s French Arab community. The author is grateful to Professor Coller for remarks incorporated into the revised version of this entry (email, May 2, 2022).
[2] For example, Huillet d’Istria 1981.
[3] See Zieseniss 1989.
[4] See
Importants Tableaux des XIXe et XXe Siècles, sale catalogue, Claude Aguttes, Neuilly, December 17, 2001, no. 358, “Portrait d’homme au turban,” oil on canvas, 72 x 55 cm, as attributed to Alexandre-François Caminade (1789–1862); and see
Collection Alberto Pinto, sale catalogue, Christie’s, Paris, September 12–14, 2017, no. 119, as “Portrait présumé de Roustam Raza (vers 1781–1845), mamelouk de Napoléon 1er,” oil on canvas, 75.3 x 58.3 cm, 19th-century French School.
[5] Anne Lafont,
L’Art et la Race: L’Africain (Tout) Contre L’Œil des Lumières, Dijon, 2019, pp. 194–204, see also p. 412. A watershed account of French artists’ engagement with Middle Easterners is Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s
Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, London, 2002.
