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Makovsky travelled to Cairo in 1873, following in the nineteenth-century tradition and interest in the culture of North Africa and the Middle East. A significant change in his style occurred after traveling to Egypt and Serbia in the mid-1870s. He began to express more of an interest in the aesthetic and compositional nature of a work: henceforth, colour and form were key. These changes can be clearly observed in Portrait of an Arab.
The painting is signed lower right in Cyrillic.
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