PAST EXHIBITIONS 2008
David Roberts: Ninteenth-Century Views of Egypt and the Holy Land,
on Loan from Friends of the Reeves Center
February 10 - April 8, 2007
David Roberts was 42 years old when he arrived in Egypt on September 24, 1838 to begin “the great central episode of my artistic life”. After three months along the Nile, seven weeks in Cairo, and three months visiting biblical sites of the Holy Land, he returned to London on July 21, 1839 “with one of the richest folios that ever left the East”, materials that “will serve me for the rest of my life”. These drawings - 172 in all, as well as three full sketchbooks – served as base for prints in the The Holy Land…and Egypt.
Roberts was a self-taught, entrepreneurial artist. He was born to a poor Scottish cobbler, but he learned to draw quickly and accurately as a theatrical set designer in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. Subsequent travels in Europe set him on his path as an architectural and topographical artist. His successful Picturesque Sketches from Spain, 1837, (some of which were also lithographed by Louis Haghe) provided him with the funds for his Middle Eastern journey.
The benevolent modernizing attitude of Muhammad Ali Pasha made travel in Egypt fairly easy, but Roberts’ experience in the Holy Land was more difficult. His journal describes encounters with armed Arabs near Petra, a quarantine for plague in Jerusalem, and conditions around Baalbek that made him so ill he had to abandon plans to visit Damascus and Palmyra and return home.
Today, Roberts is among the best known of the “Orientalist” painters.His beautiful and beguiling scenes possess great documentary and anecdotal value. In the mid-19th century they gave an avid public a real representation of what he had seen; one nuanced with ambience, drama, and detail. One hundred and fifty years later they still offer the best glimpse of the eastern Mediterranean area before photography.
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