Oriëntaalse Stadsingang met Figuren (Oriental City Entrance with Figures)

Marius Bauer, who remained a favourite of the Dutch royalty throughout his career, had the extraordinary gift to see the unusual. It’s not the main façades of seminal historical monuments but their sideways that caught his eye—as is the case with this work showing a side-entrance to a street. Honoured as a Ridder (a title of the Dutch nobility), he took back home from India, scenes that had not been essayed by European artists before his time. So much the better as it allowed him to present fresh canvases of the East to European audiences that had grown used to exotica from the other part of the world by then.