The Courtyard of a House in Cairo

In the doorway of an old house in Cairo, a veiled mother with her child talks with a man who has come with a horse, while a few children stand by and watch. Willem de Famars Testas had first gone to Egypt in 1858, and he painted this scene back in Europe, after a second journey east in 1868. In those same years Khedive Ismail, Egypt's ruler, was laying out a new European-style quarter west of the old city, begun for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The house in this picture belongs to the old city. The Rijksmuseum bought the canvas in 1881 and dates it to the years between his second journey and the purchase.