Prayer in the Mosque (Prière dans la mosquée)

Prière dans la mosquée (Prayer in the Mosque) is a small oil painting on canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme, signed lower right and measuring 40.6 × 33 cm; it is in a private collection and is a different work from the larger Prayer in the Mosque in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From the 1860s Gérôme painted a long series of Muslim men at prayer, set on rooftops and in mosques, madrasas and houses across the Middle East; early examples include Evening Prayer, Cairo of 1865 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and these became some of his most popular and most reproduced works. He built them from sketches, photographs and souvenirs collected on his travels in Egypt and Turkey. The picture is undated in the 2015 Sotheby's catalogue, and an image source from the dealer Gallery 19C places it around 1865.

A single man in a yellow silk robe and pink sash stands with his back to the viewer, his palms raised outward as if reciting 'Allahu akbar', a gesture of the standing part of the prayer. Beyond him, men sit on the floor facing a carved wooden minbar, as if listening to the Friday sermon. Tughra medallions, the calligraphic monograms of Ottoman sultans, and the arcades behind recall Istanbul interiors such as Hagia Sophia. The Sotheby's note by Emily M. Weeks points out that Gérôme had abandoned a back view in another prayer picture because a dealer feared it would not sell, as he recalled in a 1903 letter to Knoedler.

The painting was sold in Amsterdam in April 1881 as La Mosquée and bought by Van Eeghlen. It later belonged to the American radio manufacturer Arthur Atwater Kent, whose estate sale in Los Angeles in November 1949 dispersed it. Gerald Ackerman catalogued it as no. 510 in his 1986 monograph and listed it as lost in 2000; it reappeared at Sotheby's New York in 2015.