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Lot Essay
In August 1838 David Roberts set off on a momentous journey that was to take him through Egypt and what was then known as The Holy Land: an eleven month trip that his friend and biographer, James Ballantine, later described as the ‘great central episode of his artistic life; it was the fulfilment of the dream of his life from boyhood’.
Roberts and his companions arrived in Petra on 6 March 1839. Few westerners had yet visited the legendary Nabataean city, which was difficult to access and inhabited by hostile Bedouin tribesmen and Roberts was the first professional artist to make sketches for a series of worked up watercolour drawings, to which this one belongs. Drawn by Petra’s links to the biblical Edom, visitors in the 19th Century experienced a sense of awe and desolation. Roberts was astonished, writing in his Journal, ‘the whole is far beyond any idea I had ever formed of it, both in magnitude and situation’. He professed himself ‘more and more bewildered with the extent of this extraordinary city; not only the city which must be two miles in extent by nearly the same in breadth, but every ravine has been inhabited, even to the tops of the mountains. The valley itself has been filled with temples, public buildings, triumphal arches and bridges, all of which are laid prostrate with the exception of one triumphal arch & one temple …’ (these and the following citation are from Roberts’s MS Eastern Journal, National Library of Scotland (Acc.7723/2).
On 10 March, the date of this watercolour, he made ‘several sketches of the leading features of this extraordinary place’, despite the rain that had set in. These and the others he made during the five days he remained there, were the basis for 13 of the 247 watercolours which, during the decade after his return to England, Roberts made for the series of lithographs executed by Louis Haghe and eventually published together as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (6 vols., London: F.G. Moon, 1842-49).
Roberts and his companions arrived in Petra on 6 March 1839. Few westerners had yet visited the legendary Nabataean city, which was difficult to access and inhabited by hostile Bedouin tribesmen and Roberts was the first professional artist to make sketches for a series of worked up watercolour drawings, to which this one belongs. Drawn by Petra’s links to the biblical Edom, visitors in the 19th Century experienced a sense of awe and desolation. Roberts was astonished, writing in his Journal, ‘the whole is far beyond any idea I had ever formed of it, both in magnitude and situation’. He professed himself ‘more and more bewildered with the extent of this extraordinary city; not only the city which must be two miles in extent by nearly the same in breadth, but every ravine has been inhabited, even to the tops of the mountains. The valley itself has been filled with temples, public buildings, triumphal arches and bridges, all of which are laid prostrate with the exception of one triumphal arch & one temple …’ (these and the following citation are from Roberts’s MS Eastern Journal, National Library of Scotland (Acc.7723/2).
On 10 March, the date of this watercolour, he made ‘several sketches of the leading features of this extraordinary place’, despite the rain that had set in. These and the others he made during the five days he remained there, were the basis for 13 of the 247 watercolours which, during the decade after his return to England, Roberts made for the series of lithographs executed by Louis Haghe and eventually published together as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (6 vols., London: F.G. Moon, 1842-49).