David Roberts: El Deir, Petra[/caption]
The Victorians were fascinated by scenes of far-off lands, in particular by what was perceived as ‘exotic Arabia,’ a fascination paralleled by the present-day interest of the people of that region for images of their homeland, and in the perpetuation of their heritage. Fuelled by oil wealth, the extensive buying during the past three decades or so by private collectors, museums and corporate organisations of the Middle East has radically affected international art market prices, stimulating a consequent and well-deserved interest in Victorian or 19th century art in its homeland—work that had become deeply unfashionable.[caption id="attachment_55233704" align="alignright" width="300"]
David Roberts in 1844 by Hill & Adamson[/caption]
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, following Napoleon’s conquest of Europe and the opening of overland trade routes to India for foreigners (then countries hardly visited by Westerners), artists and archaeologists from Britain and France in particular were drawn to the region. Following the example of so many British artists before him, David Roberts (1796–1864) regularly travelled in Europe in search of new subjects. But unlike most of his contemporaries, he travelled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa, under conditions that at the time were often arduous, dangerous, and potentially injurious to the health of a northern European.
In 1838 David Roberts, who hailed from Scotland, arrived in Egypt, and by 1839 had reached Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. The publication of Roberts’ six volumes of lithographs, including Syria, Idumea, and Arabia between 1842 and 1849, met with huge success and critical acclaim. One may very well ask how and why a Scotsman came to be travelling round the Orient, sketch pad in hand.
Born in Stockbridge in 1796, Roberts emerged from humble circumstances: his father a shoe-maker, but interestingly, his mother was an admirer of the Cathedral and monastic remains of her native St Andrew’s, an enthusiasm she communicated to her son. He had shown an early aptitude for drawing, and there was scarcely an old castle or ruined chapel in his area that Roberts did not sketch as a boy. Some of these talented drawings were shown to the master of the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh, who advised “that as the parents of the boy were poor, he had best be apprenticed to a house-painter, where he might still practice drawing, and learn an art by which he could make his living.”
And so Roberts served a long, harsh apprenticeship with an overbearing master, Gavin Beugo. Yet those challenging seven years stimulated Roberts’ incipient passion for architecture, plunging deeper than the surface decoration with which he was involved as a house-painter and interior decorator.
By 1818, Roberts had become an assistant scene painter in a minor Edinburgh theatre, and graduated fairly rapidly to being principal painter in leading Scots theatres. The dizzy heights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London beckoned, and as chief theatrical painter, he adapted to southern trends. Later, his experience with handling architectural subjects on a vast scale for stage scenery was to prove invaluable. He comments in his Journal that the task of communicating the grandeur and scale of some of the monuments he was recording was “impossible.” He writes of the “stupendous” rocks at Petra, and of conveying the dimensions of the huge columns at Karnak in Egypt. Again in his Journal, he wrote, “You must be under them [the columns] and look up and walk ’round them” to gain a true impression of their grandeur.
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El Khasneh, Petra (courtesy of Mathaf Gallery)[/caption]
During this period of his life as a scenery painter, Roberts had begun to take up painting seriously, exhibiting and receiving increasingly fulsome accolades. He was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1838, becoming a full member in 1841. After travelling to France, Spain, and other European centres of antique architectural splendor—and painting them to considerable acclaim—he began preparing for the most important event of his life: the journey to the Orient.
As his contemporary biographer, Ballantine, recognised, this was “the great central episode of his artistic life,” the fulfillment of “the dream of his life from boyhood,” . . . “the brightest of his anticipations as an artist.” Supplied with a letter of introduction from the Foreign Office to Colonel Campbell, Consul-General for Egypt, Roberts left England in 1838, arriving at Alexandria a month later. He was given a guard to ward off “interruption or insult whilst sketching,” as his Journal puts it, and even obtained permission to paint inside mosques, provided that his brushes were not made of hog’s bristles.
After drawing almost every edifice from Nubia to the Mediterranean, he prepared to cross the desert by the route of the ancient flight of the Israelites from Egypt to Mount Sinai, via southern Jordan, touching Aqaba and Petra, and then continue on to Palestine. Roberts and his party dressed themselves as Arabs and left Cairo “well-armed with 21 camels, and nearly as many Bedouin Arabs.” Roberts wrote in his Journal, “I am so completely transmogrified in appearance that my dear old mother would never know me. Before I could get admission to the mosques, I had to transfer my whiskers to my upper lip, and don the full Arab costume... I have a tent (a very gay one, I assure you), skins for carrying water, pewter dishes, provisions of all sorts, not forgetting a brace of Turkish pistols, and a warm covering for the night. Imagine me mounted on my camel, and you will have an idea of what an Eastern monarch I am.” We also begin to have an idea of how novel, exotic, and potent the Oriental experience was for Victorians.
It was one of Roberts’ achievements to familiarize a new and appreciative audience with the look and feel of foreign places, a window that the Romantic poets like Byron and Scott had opened. Indeed, those poetry books often contained landscape illustrations and were so successful that publishers sent artists abroad in increasing numbers. Roberts too contributed to such books.
Roberts was well aware of the potential commercial value of images of Egyptian temples, Islamic mosques, and the ruins and landscape of the Holy Land. His sketches of them would make “one of the richest folios that ever left the East.” However romantic his response to the magnificent sights of the Orient, it was based on the sound practical knowledge that his journey would bring him fame and fortune, since no artist of his caliber had previously attempted such an ambitious topographical project.
Roberts himself wrote in his Journal of Petra:
I am more and more bewildered with the aspect of this extraordinary City. Not only the city, which must be two miles in length by nearly the same in breadth, but every ravine has been inhabited, even to the tops of the mountains. The valley has been filled up with public buildings, temples, triumphal arches, and bridges, all of which, with the exception of one triumphal arch and one temple, are prostrate... Though the ruins of this extraordinary place are immense, they sink into insignificance when compared with these stupendous rocks. I often throw aside my pencil, in despair of being able to convey any idea of the scene.
But convey it he did. No publication before The Holy Land & Egypt had presented so comprehensive a series of views of the monuments, landscape, and people of the Near East. His melancholy comparisons of past grandeur and present decay of the great monuments of the Orient were typical of his time, derived the Romantic attitude to ruins (and not only those of the Near East). Yet despite his exquisite drawing and perfect composition, the accomplished Roberts was decidedly not an imaginative artist. His lithographs, watercolours and oils are not the inspired masterpieces Turner might have created. He is essentially a prosaic, professional Victorian, working within the conventions of his time. His great success lay in recognising his limitations and making clarity of perception a virtue. That sheer professionalism appealed to early Victorian England, with its connotations of honest, industrial toil.
Roberts has his detractors, and one of the accusations laid against him by art critics is that he ‘used’ people as foreground interest, and as just an addition to his central obsession with fallen buildings. John Ruskin, a trenchant Victorian art critic, disliked what was in truth a pictorial device of Roberts—to use people as foreground colour and scale—“thus we have been encumbered with caftans, pipes and scimitars, when all we wanted was a lizard or an ibis.”
But the genuine Roberts response might have been that human figures add interest and perspective, giving a further dimension to an otherwise austere landscape or ruin, and he readily admitted that figure painting was not his strong point.
Further artistic license was taken to achieve greater dramatic impact and to re-create the mood that the subject itself evoked—these were not mere topographical records. Witness his exaggeration of the height and width of buildings, by altering proportions and reducing the scale of figures. He would also use colourful weather conditions to create stunning effects. His most successful compositions seem to be those which combine his sense of drama, derived from his experience as a stage scenery painter, with his considerable powers of observation, perfected when depicting the intricate tracery of Gothic and Moorish architecture.
In the end, after this “great central episode of his artistic life,” Roberts returned to England. Working with Louis Haghe, his lithographer, it took the two men nearly eight years to print the lithographs, which today fetch prices at auction that would simply have been unbelievable in Roberts’ day, even to a canny Scotsman.
