George John Cayley's Algiers

We have added interesting new pictures to our 19th-century Algiers collection by English eccentric and 'wayward philosopher' George John Cayley (1826–1878). Cayley was an accomplished metalworker (who collaborated with George Frederick Watts RA), a talented artist, travel writer, war correspondent in Crimea, and perhaps most famously, early proponent of Lawn Tennis.

The watercolours tell a story of French colonial rule: a world of grand villas, sprawling estates of cactus and palm, of cobalt seas and vermillion sunsets. Cayley relocated to Algiers with his young family in 1870 on account of ill-health. The son of Yorkshire MP Edward Stillingfleet Cayley, George moved amongst the ruling colonial elite—his children perform amateur dramatics at the home of Consul-General Sir Robert Lambert Playfair. But George was also a man of contradictions, 'part Bohemian, part conventional', unable to completely renegue on his aristocratic roots but left-wing in his politics and outward-looking. A trained barrister, he shunned material wealth and 'with what he had he was open-handed'. He attempted to assimilate into the societies he visited, dressing in Andalusian garb in his travels across Spain, and often adopting Arab dress in Algiers. 'He had seen many places, known many people in many lands…. He was a man of the world, citizen of the world.'