The Palace Guard (1902) by the Austrian painter Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935).Deutsch was a very successful orientalist painter and spent most of his career in Paris. To achieve highly detailed scenes he travelled various times to Egypt, took a lot of photographs and had a large collection of tiles, furniture, arms, pipes, fabrics, and costumes.
But nonwithstanding that he was very exact in the details of architecture and costumes his paintings are pure invention. They are glorifying an exotic oriental past, which never existed. But especially because of this combination Deutsch can be considered as one of the ancestors of modern fantasy art.
