Middle Eastern Oil Paintings

This is a region of interiors and thresholds as much as of monuments. A riad garden at noon, when the light comes straight down into the courtyard. A lantern stall in Khan el-Khalili. A workshop where dhows are still built by hand. The famous silhouettes are here too, but they are not the whole of it.

What is in this collection

Around seventy-five paintings in four groups. Sacred architecture holds the Dome of the Rock over the Temple Mount at dusk and the buildings people travel for. Courtyards and souks covers Moroccan riad gardens, the lantern stalls of Cairo and the rooftop mosaics of the old city of Sana'a. Work and craft takes in the Gulf dhow builders at sunset and a falconer at Souq Waqif at sunrise. Land and people runs from a Lebanese cedar forest under snowfall to a Bedouin elder in a keffiyeh.

The palette is warm ochre and deep shadow, because most of this light arrives at an angle through something: a screen, an arcade, a doorway.

How each painting is made

Nothing here is printed. Each canvas is painted in oils after you order it, by an artist working from the reference on the page. The lead time runs in weeks and no two canvases are identical.

You set the dimensions rather than choosing from a fixed list. Three finishes are available: Simple for a clean, even surface, Texture for visible brushwork, and Museum for the heaviest impasto, which suits tilework and carved screens well.

Choosing one for a room

Courtyard and architectural subjects hold an upright format, where an arch or a minaret has room to rise, and they suit a hallway or an entrance. Landscape and desert scenes want width and a low hang.

These are warm paintings and they carry a cool, north-facing room particularly well. Tell us the wall and we will suggest a proportion.

A place of your own

A city you come from, a house, a mosque or a church that matters to your family: send a photograph and an artist will look at it before anything is agreed. Shipping is free worldwide.