Carlo Naya
Otto Schoefft
Le Caire pittoresque
before 1875
36 albumen prints. Each approx. 25 x 20.5 cm, portrait and landscape formats. Each individually flush-mounted to card, printed title and photographer's name 'O. Schoefft' below the images on the mount.
Further images on request.
Otto Schoeft, a native of Pest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, who originally studied painting, is considered one of the most ambitious European-born photographers, who worked in Egypt in the last third of the 19th century. Commissioned by the Egyptian viceroy Ismail Pasha and in collaboration with Carlo Naya, he created his genre scenes, portraits, architectural and landscape photographs, highly praised by contemporary critics, for the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. They were probably first distributed in 1875 as a series of 91 albumin prints under the title Le Caire pittoresque. The prints from this series, kept at the Austrian National Library, usually bear on the support card the name of Schoefft next to the respective picture title and in most cases also the name of Carlo Naya and the title of the series. On the support cards of the present mixed lot consisting of 36 prints, neither the title of the series nor the name of the colleague can be seen; nevertheless, the motifs manifesting the European's view of the picturesque and exotic aspects of the Orient are identical.