Past Perfect: An Artist in an Antique Land

When Englishman Francis Frith (1822–1898) set off for Egypt in 1856, he packed three cameras, intending to capture the essence of the land and its people. Though photography in Frith’s day was a cumbersome, complicated process, it was also excitingly novel. The invention of photography in 1839 coincided with a significant increase in European travel to Egypt. Lithographs, paintings and florid travel accounts from the period portrayed Egypt as a romantic land of the senses. The boatloads of plundered antiquities that flooded the museums of Europe’s capitals also helped convey the romance of the Orient. (In 1818, a colossal […]