Hot Bargain in Cairo (A Hot Bargain, Cairo; Horse Market, Cairo)

This painting is the first important purchase of art made by the Union League Club. Before that, works were usually donated or commissioned. The members demonstrated their savvy by this purchase, as Orientalism, the genre that it represents, would later become highly coveted and valuable. This painting illustrates an afternoon courtyard scene in Cairo, where two men in eastern-style dress discuss the sale of the white horse exhibited on the right. The horse is without saddle in order to display his physical merits. Rich with detail, the Club’s painting is rendered with both loose brushstrokes and precision, blending to deliver a scene invoking atmosphere and presence.

After Napoleon Bonaparte marched into Egypt in 1789, followed in three years by the British-Ottoman occupation, artists risked illness and banditry to travel to the Middle East, lured by the exotic subject matter, sunshine, and bright colors. The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal further encouraged foreign visitors. Native Alabaman Frederick Arthur Bridgman was among this group. He first studied art at the Brooklyn Art School and the National Academy of Design. But it would be his time spent in Paris, especially while in the studio of famed academic and Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, that he would be introduced to the intoxicating subject matter and style of Orientalism. Hot Bargain in Cairo was accepted into the Paris Salon of 1884, where a new category for this subject of art was created under the rubric of "Orientalism." Bridgman spent most of his life in Paris, making trips back to America as well as visiting Algeria and Cairo, where he found unbounded inspiration.