Backward Glance: Painting the Past: The Lithographs of David Roberts

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David Roberts was no archaeologist. But, thanks to his scores of lithographs of the Holy Land, he may have done more to popularize ancient sites in the Near East than anyone else in the 19th century.

Roberts was an artist who lived before archaeology became a scholarly endeavor. He was born on October 24, 1796, in Stockbridge, Scotland, near Edinburgh. His father was a poor cobbler who encouraged his son’s talent early on: When David saw circus posters around Stockbridge, he took red chalk and drew lines of animals and circus figures all along the walls of the Roberts kitchen. After that, his only real training was as an apprentice to Gavin Beugo, a local decorator and house painter. At age 19, Roberts became an assistant set designer in a small theater in Edinburgh. By 1821, Roberts had worked his way up to the Drury Lane Theatre in London. All the while, Roberts had been sketching every castle, ruin, and scenic vista he saw. His first oil painting was shown at the British Institution in 1824, and his “View of the Cathedral of Rouen” was exhibited at the Royal Academy shortly thereafter.

Roberts’s paintings and engravings received such a good response from the public that he was gradually able to leave stage work and turn to the far more profitable field of studio painting. He truly found his niche in travel illustration, however. His first major excursion was to Spain, at the time a country little known to the English. For almost two years, he visited all the major cities and sketched ruins and monuments from all eras, particularly Moorish and Gothic. His Picturesque Sketches of Spain, published in 1837, was enormously popular.

Roberts used the money he earned from his journey through Spain to travel to the Near East in 1839. It became the trip that would make him famous. The 123 lithographs he exhibited and published in three large, lavish albums in 1842 aroused an unprecedented excitement about the area and its sacred sites. These books offered many Europeans their first contact with scenes from the Holy Land. Napoleon’s excursions into Egypt and the southern Mediterranean had aroused interest earlier in the century, but most artistic representations that they inspired contained at least as much imagination as realism. Subsequently, pictures of the Holy Land that were more true to life were not recognized as true works of art. Roberts was the first artist to sketch on site instead of in the studio.

Roberts put great store in authenticity, but, in his work, authenticity and complete accuracy do not necessarily mean the same thing. He was known to prettify his scenes. Palm trees and picturesquely dressed locals decorate lithographs of such sites as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. And when Cana of Galilee—which he described in his journal as “a village of forty or fifty houses, most of them in ruins”—proved to be a disappointment, he sketched it as a small part of a larger landscape.

Roberts drew the things from the Near East of 1839 that caught his attention, and did not restrict himself to holy sites. Several plates were dedicated to a group of pilgrims he met as they headed to the Jordan River. Roberts produced a lithograph of the pilgrims after they had stripped their clothes off and made a mad dash into the river, shrieking at the top of their lungs as they ran naked. (One young Greek man drowned when he got caught up in the rapid current.) “The scene in the river was most exciting,” Roberts wrote in his journal. “Young and old, male and female, were in the stream in one promiscuous mass.” Later he drew the Egyptian army conducting military exercises in front of the city walls of St. Acre (modern Akko). If mosques, churches and temples were all jumbled together in Jerusalem, he didn’t separate them to concentrate on the church. If real life Bedouins were more interesting than the ancient town behind their camp, the Bedouins were the subject of the picture, not the town. And if a landscape was beautiful but not particularly historic, Roberts sketched it anyway.

One reason for the popularity of Roberts’s lithographs must have been the story behind the subject. In the 1830s and 1840s, people were just beginning to travel for pleasure—the steam train was still a recent invention—and the British Empire was greatly expanding. An article in the British 055publication The Art Journal in 1858 said Roberts’s journey “seems to have been entered upon solely from a love of artistic adventure.” And it was an adventure: After three months of cruising the Nile on a chartered boat, Roberts and three companions he met in Cairo decided to enter Palestine by following the same route they imagined Moses had followed. But while Moses escaped with a bedraggled band through the desert, Roberts had a safe conduct letter signed by the Pasha so his group could obtain an armed escort whenever they needed it. They wore local dress and had a caravan of 21 camels and 21 armed Bedouins, tents, food, and ammunition. They were in sight of Suez three days after leaving Cairo, following what a later writer called “a track marked only by the fossilized carcasses of camel after camel.” Roberts wrote his daughter Christine:

“I have provided everything requisite for my journey. 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, my black servant on another, and two men with my tent and luggage; the other two gentlemen similarly furnished and accoutred, surrounded by a host of the children of the desert—the wild Arabs; and you will have an idea of what an Eastern monarch I am.”

Later, Roberts entered the Monastery of St. Catherine by a rope lowered from the walls, was attacked by bandits at Petra, and came down with fever. He arrived in Jerusalem on Good Friday, the very day a quarantine for the plague was lifted. And, according to the introduction to the first edition of his lithographs:

“He even obtained permission to enter every mosque he desired to visit, a privilege never before given to a Christian, but to which one condition was attached—that in the instruments he used in making his studies, for he was allowed to paint there, he was not to desecrate the mosque by the introduction and use of brushes made of hog’s bristles.”

Roberts was a man of his time, and this was the time of imperialism. The introduction to his book—an introduction not, incidentally, written by Roberts—says that when he sailed the Nile, “He was entirely master of the party, and carried the British flag at the mast head.” And in his journal description of the Circular Temple at Baalbek, Roberts himself wrote, “A few years will probably level it to the ground. The wild inhabitants have but little value for ruins, beyond their iron and limestone … The only hope of saving the last honours of Syria is by rescuing and reviving them in England.” Still, he approached the people he met with a wide-eyed interest and a relative lack of condescension.

Roberts returned to England about a year after he set out, in the latter part of 1839. He immediately—and, for a while, unsatisfactorily—contacted publishers about his drawings. He finally settled on Francis Graham Moon, who paid him 3,000 pounds for the publication rights and for Roberts’s supervision of the etching of the printing plates. (Roberts worked closely with the lithographer Louis Haghe in this process and said Haghe “not only surpassed himself, but all that has hitherto been done of a similar nature.”) It took two years to finish the laborious process of making the lithographs, which, combined with the time and expense involved in the original journey, meant his ultimate 3,000 pound fee didn’t come out to a lot of money, even in 1839.

The lithographs were an immediate sensation, however, and Roberts reaped the benefits that fame brought. He was made a member of the Royal Academy immediately after the prints were published. For the next 20 years, Roberts made several trips throughout Europe, each time creating prints that were shown with great success in the leading galleries of London and other major cities. His work continued to receive awards and he was able to make a nice living by working on commission or by selling his pictures as soon as they were finished—a long way from his beginnings painting marbelized columns in the houses of the Scottish gentry. Roberts died of a heart attack on November 25, 1864, at the age of 68.

David Roberts was no archaeologist. But, thanks to his scores of lithographs of the Holy Land, he may have done more to popularize ancient sites in the Near East than anyone else in the 19th century. Roberts was an artist who lived before archaeology became a scholarly endeavor. He was born on October 24, 1796, in Stockbridge, Scotland, near Edinburgh. His father was a poor cobbler who encouraged his son’s talent early on: When David saw circus posters around Stockbridge, he took red chalk and drew lines of animals and circus figures all along the walls of the Roberts […]