![Charles Wilda - A Mystic, Cairo [1890]](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1676/26003432184_9621e32d24_o.jpg)
Accompanied by men playing drums, his audience enthralled, a mystic invokes a spirit in what is likely to be a Zār ritual. Originally practiced in Sudan, the Zār was adopted in other regions of North Africa including Egypt and, with numerous variations to this day, it consists in the acknowledgment of a human body being possessed by a spirit. By means of music and dancing, usually performed by women, the body enters a sort of trance and is finally liberated from the evil spirit.
Born in Vienna in 1854, Charles Wilda trained at the Viennese Akademie der bildenden Künste under Leopold Carl Müller. Like many of his fellow Orientalist painters, he travelled to Egypt in the early 1880s and set up a studio in Cairo where he developed a keen interest for the depiction of everyday Egyptian life. Wilda exhibited widely in Vienna and Berlin, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. In the year of his death, 1907, the Künstlerhaus in Vienna honoured him with his first retrospective.
[Sotheby’s, London - Oil on panel, 68 x 95cm]