Backward Glance: Divergent Visions of the Holy Land

052

In 1817, a young Englishman named Charles Barry, moved by the spirit of travel that was sweeping Europe after the havoc of the Napoleonic Wars, decided—against the advice of his family—to tour the great architectural sites of Europe. He had just completed six years of training as an architect with the firm of Middleton and Bailey of Lambeth, London, which he had paid for with part of the modest legacy of 250 pounds left him by his late father. The tour that Barry envisioned would undoubtedly consume the rest of his inheritance and, his family feared, leave him penniless.

Nevertheless, Barry set out, bidding farewell to his new fiancée, Sarah Rowsell. He traveled alone to France, and from there to Italy, following the conventional path of the Grand Tour established by previous generations of educated young Englishmen. In Barry’s day the Grand Tour often ended there.

In Italy, however, Barry fell in with a group of like-minded young travelers 053from England. Together they continued on to Greece, examining classical art and architecture and then went on to Turkey. Wherever his journey took him, the young architect copiously recorded all that he saw in his sketchbooks and travel diaries.

In August 1818, as he was preparing to return to England and his fiancee, he was introduced to David Baillie, an archaeological traveler from Cambridge who admired Barry’s spare, precise sketches, and who made an offer the younger man could not refuse. If Barry would travel with Baillie to Egypt and Palestine and sketch the scenery and buildings there, Baillie would pay him 200 pounds sterling a year plus his expenses. Baillie would own Barry’s original sketches, but Barry could make copies for himself.

At that time, no English architect had yet sketched the great monuments of Egypt or the landscapes of the Bible. Young Barry would be the first. How could he resist?

In Egypt, the party of Barry, Baillie and two other travelers journeyed up the Nile as far as the second cataract. They later entered Palestine by way of Gaza, in search of the places the Bible had made famous. As always, Barry carefully and comprehensively documented the places they visited, producing a vast corpus of sketches and drawings of landscapes that, in those early decades of the 19th century, were still unfamiliar to Western eyes.

Along with the 17 notebooks of his journal, Barry’s drawings can be seen today at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. Although he clearly was most interested in architecture and landscapes, an exquisite painted ink drawing of a hoopoe, with its crest of reddish feathers proudly 054displayed, shows that Barry was also attuned to other aspects of the environment.

Barry’s journals offer rich evidence of his keen powers of observation of the physical features of the Bible lands, but they scarcely mention the religious significance of places and events Barry witnessed. One exception is Barry’s description of the ceremony of the “Miracle of the Holy Fire,” a colorful ritual in Greek Orthodox observance of Easter at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in which the patriarch passes lights from the flaming lamps above the sepulchre through the congregation, until everyone’s lamp is lit.^a This religious ritual struck the Englishman as “pagan and idolatrous.”¹

Barry’s portfolio of unsentimental views of the Bible lands, however, presages a renewal of European interest and involvement in the Bible lands later in the 19th century, when geographers and travelers began to study the natural attributes of the region apart from its role in the development of Western religions. In effect, Barry’s work helped lift from the Holy Land “the halo of timelessness it had worn for centuries.”²

Barry returned home in August 1820 to a fiancée who had waited three years for him. After a project to publish his Egyptian drawings fell through, he put aside his Holy Land sketchbooks.

Not until the 1830s did a few of Barry’s Biblical landscapes emerge from obscurity, and then only briefly. By that time, European travelers had begun to extend their tours beyond Italy and Greece into the Bible lands (modern Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). To capitalize on the traveling public’s heightened interest in the region, London publishers William and Edward Finden, along with their partner John Murray, planned to produce a book of Biblical landscapes based on the most current information. In 1833 they commissioned several artists to illustrate the new book, the most famous of whom, J.M.W. Turner, was perhaps the greatest English landscape artist of the 19th century.

Never having been to the Holy Land or any other Near Eastern country, Turner and the others were to base their illustrations on drawings made on-site by early travelers. The Finden brothers compiled for that purpose a collection of images from almost 30 visitors to the Bible lands, including pilgrims, army officers, archaeologists—and Charles Barry, who by that time was approaching the pinnacle of his career as an architect. (His major success would come in 1836, when he would win a commission to rebuild the Houses of Parliament, which had burned down two years earlier.) From Barry’s portfolio, the publishers pulled 25 sketches to add to their archive.

The artists were given some leeway in choosing the sketches they would use. Turner clearly preferred Charles Barry’s sketches and successfully vied with other artists for them. Of the 26 paintings Turner produced for the Finden project, 14 were based on Barry’s drawings.

The influential Victorian art critic John Ruskin would later describe some of these works of Turner as “quite unrivalled examples of his richest executive power on a small scale.”³ The paintings display Turner’s command of light and color—but also reveal that the artist had never experienced the crystal-clear atmosphere of the Bible lands that is so unlike the gray blanket that overlays Northern Europe. When his watercolors are compared with Barry’s simple, almost severe sketches, the interpretive license taken by the master landscapist becomes obvious: Turner did not regard it his duty to reproduce the Holy Land as Barry had observed it. Rather, according to Mordechai Omer, a scholar of Romantic painting, “Turner added to the on-the-spot sketches … his own knowledge of nature—nature as he had experienced and observed it.”⁴

Barry’s sketch, The Pools of Solomon, for example, offers only a few stark lines to indicate the three pools and the surrounding 055landscape near Hebron. Turner’s painting of the scene displays one of his most elaborate portrayals of the sky above the still pools—and adds for good measure a few oriental soldiers in the foreground. In Turner’s watercolor, Egypt with the View of the Pyramids of Ghizah, which is based on Barry’s Pyramids of Ghizah, Turner also let his imagination roam. Barry’s rendition, sketched from afar, shows a wide, flat desert that diminishes those famous hallmarks of ancient Egypt. Turner enlarged and rearranged the three pyramids in Barry’s sketch and added a fourth, along with a band of camel-riding Arabs. The misty desert clouds almost extinguish the sun at the horizon.

Although some of Turner’s paintings are more faithful to Barry’s sketches, they always include elements that could only have come from Turner’s brush. In Jerusalem, Pool of Bethesda, Turner mostly replicated the carefully recorded domes, minarets and walls of Barry’s Jerusalem but added a wall to the right as a backdrop to three seated women. In contrast to the flat light in which Barry rendered the scene, however, Turner flooded the city with luminous color, while casting the pool in shadowy decay. He banished the overgrown weeds that clog the site in Barry’s sketch and, in a timely detail inserted at the dawn of archaeology, added at the lower left a man on a ladder, examining the wall. Below him a small cluster of people await his descent.

Turner’s works and those of the other artists were published in two volumes in 1836. They were later reissued by John Murray under the title Landscape Illustrations of the Bible consisting of views of the most remarkable places mentioned in the Old and New Testaments from original sketches taken on the spot. The book became quite popular among 19th-century travelers visiting the Bible lands.

By the time the book was published, Barry had received the commission for the new Houses of Parliament. The first stone of his highly innovative neo-Gothic complex of buildings was laid in 1840; not until 1852, however, did the Queen formally open them. Barry was knighted shortly afterwards. By his death in 1860, the building had not been completed. That was left to his son, Edward Middleton Barry.

Barry’s Biblical landscapes were consigned to relative obscurity in leather-bound volumes in the archive that also holds his far more famous architectural drawings and plans.

Although for most people, Barry’s achievements in British architecture remain his greatest epitaph, for some who love the Bible lands, Barry’s sketches tell a truth about these places that is remarkable for its fidelity and unequaled in its time.

In 817, a young Englishman named Charles Barry, moved by the spirit of travel that was sweeping Europe after the havoc of the Napoleonic Wars, decided—against the advice of his family—to tour the great architectural sites of Europe. He had just completed six years of training as an architect with the firm of Middleton and Bailey of Lambeth, London, which he had paid for with part of the modest legacy of 250 pounds left him by his late father. The tour that Barry envisioned would undoubtedly consume the rest of his inheritance and, his family feared, leave him penniless. […]