David Roberts, Scottish painter, was born in Stockbridge, (then near Edinburgh, now one of its residential suburbs) on October 24th, 1796. His parents were poor, his father being a shoe maker. From an early age, Roberts displayed a distinct artistic talent. Therefore, on the advice of the director of the Trustees Academy at Edinburgh, the young boy (age 10) was apprenticed to a house-painter. This eventually involved decorative and mural-like work and lasted approximately seven years. It was hard work but would provide the future artist with a practical knowledge of how to paint in various mediums. In fact, nearly everything Roberts - never a formally schooled artist - would need later concerning the technical aspect of his profession he would learn during this apprenticeship.
In 1816, just shy of 20, the young David Roberts joined a troupe of traveling pantomimists (called the Pantheon) as a theatrical backdrop painter, to the dismay of both parents. But as the artist later wrote, “To travel in company with strolling players...might not be very respectable, but it gave me an opportunity of seeing England, and of painting pictures on a large scale.” It also gave Roberts experience and skill in what he termed “aerial perspective,” blending objects together without a hard and definite line. In addition he learned to make any canvas resemble wood or marble. Moreover, and this would particularly come in handy later on, he learned to paint rapidly yet accurately.
With the traveling group’s demise, Roberts divided his time painting theatrical scenery and house decoration, his original line of training. With a brighter future in mind, he also spent his evenings painting in oils, perfecting and amalgamating his various skills and techniques. Eventually he landed a position as principal painter at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, following that by employment, in 1820-21, at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh.
It was during this time (in 1820) that he married a young Scottish actress. The marriage was not a happy one and shortly after their only child Christine was born, the marriage was dissolved. Roberts’s chief biographer, James Ballantine, cites his wife’s drinking as the reason for the failed marriage. But since Ballantine was a good personal friend of the artist, the reason for her drinking might just as well have been Roberts himself. He never remarried nor, as far as we know, had any intimate female liasons. He always remained, however, close to his daughter.
Even before his trip, and certainly after it, Roberts had established a reputation as an important architectural artist. If not celebrated, he was on the verge of earning his living now on commissions alone, any artist’s dream. The trip took him not only to Spain but Portugal and Morocco. After visiting Burgos, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Cordova, Granada, Malaga, Gibraltar, Cadiz and Seville, he settled down in Spain for several months, working up some of his sketches in oil. In all, he would depart with more than 200 sketches of both people and places, although confessing in a letter home, “I begin to doubt whether I shall be able to paint half of them.” On his return from Spain, in 1833, several of his sketches were published by Jennings in three issues of "The Landscape Annual." In addition, 25 of the Spanish sketches were lithographed and issued in a volume called Picturesque Sketches from Spain published in 1837 by John Murray. (This publication brought him into contact with the Belgium-born artist and lithographer Louis Haghe who would figure so prominently in the success of his future Egypt and Holy Land series.) The following year Roberts was elected an associate to the Royal Academy (this meant a “junior” member), the usual step before being initiated as a full member into this most hallowed circle of British artists. Roberts was by now planning the event that would change his life forever: a protracted trip to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. It is not clear who (if any) inspired him to make this - at the time extremely arduous and even dangerous - journey. He was always drawn to the exotic. But infatuation with the East aside, Roberts was also shrewd: he knew that the fame and fortune he craved could be greatly assisted by the publication of a series of sketches from Egypt and the Near East, at the time generating an enormous allure on the British imagination. (In addition to being in the private collection of the above-mentioned Lord Northwich, Roberts’s work was now also found in the collections of Lord, the Duke of Beadford, the Earl of Essex, and the Marquis of Lansdowne, all people of high standing and great influence.)3 So, on a warm summer day in late August, 1838, Roberts departed for his journey. Traveling via Paris and the Rhône valley, he arrived in Marseilles on 11 September. From there a steamer carried him on to Malta and the Greek Cycladian isles to his arrival, on the 24th of the month, on the African continent at Alexandria. The journey thus far had occupied 24 days. Alexandria was the home of Colonel Campbell, British consul - from whom Roberts would secure that most valuable of documents - a firman or edict allowing him to travel freely throughout the country.
In his detailed travel journal, Roberts relates with great enthusiasm the sights, colors, and smells of his first impressions of this strange new land. Writing a few days later, in Cairo, after visiting the Pyramids of Geza, he wrote: “Not much struck with the size of the great one till I began the ascent, which is no joke. The Sphinx pleased me even more than the Pyramids.” Later, however, when sitting down to draw these unique edifices of stone, he was forced to admit, like so many others, that “I cannot express my feelings on seeing these vast monuments.” From Cairo, he hired a dhahabiyeh, the standard boat of transport for the relatively affluent traveler (the cost of the boat, including the captain and a crew of eight was about £15 per month, a substantial sum). Leaving on 6 October, their initial progress was slow due to the high flood of the Nile that year. The boat often had to be rowed or towed from the bank by his hired crew. (A second boat accompanied Roberts’s, with a certain “Mr. A.” and “Mr. V,” as well as a Captain Nelly of the 77th or East Middlesex Regiment, who appears in several of Roberts’s drawings.) From Roberts’s journal we know that the heat was particularly intense, even in this “Winter” season. Once one of the boats had to be deliberately sunk to rid it of rats. Any many times the hostile behavior of the locals made visiting (not to mention sketching) the monuments a trying ordeal. Reaching Dendera, at the time (due to its preservation) considered one of the greatest of all Egyptian antiquities, Roberts at first doubted whether its reputation would hold up (he had done extensive research in preparation for his journey, including the language and customs of the native populations). But after exploring the ruins, he wrote, “I reached my boat overcome by melancholy reflections on the mutability of all human greatness, and the perishable nature of even the most enduring works of human genius.”Roberts was also overcome by more mundane aspects of this strange country. He more than once mentions the extreme poverty which, in Upper Egypt, particularly depressed him. He writes of the inhuman conditions of Mehemet Ali’s subjects: the slave-trade, the chained captives, the “ruthless system of conscription and the lamentable lack of hygiene in the villages where the dead bodies of animals and partly buried corpses gave off an unbearable stench” (Hans Schneider). But, these thoughts aside, his mission was to visually document a country as it had never been before. 4 Roberts continued as far south as Abu Simbel (“those stupendous edifices”), having decided to make the longer stops necessary for sketching the monuments he thought most interesting on the homeward journey. Thus,
27 November: Made two drawings of Karnak.
28 November: Made two drawings of the Great Temple at Karnak.
29 November: Made three drawings of Karnak.
30 November: Made two studies in oil, and one general view in pencil.
1 December: Commenced and finished at Luxor. Made three large sketches, one...coloured.
2 December: Sunday...
3 December: Visited the Tombs of the Kings. Made a coloured sketch of the valley....
4 December: Made three coloured sketches of colossal statues in the plain of Thebes.
It may be noted that Roberts, like virtually all architectural painters at the time, was assisted in his observations by the camera lucida (light box), a device that projected the object desired via a prism onto a sheet of paper. This facilitated such spectacular perspective renderings as “View from under the Portico of the Temple of Edfu.”
Eventually Roberts had finished more than 100 sketches, “all of them paintable subjects,” gleefully adding, “I am the first English artist who has been here [note: had he forgotten his Scottish nationality??]. We shall see what impression they make in England.” Luckily he had survived a near-fatal ordeal to his entire enterprise. While in Abydos (whose temple was at that time still largely unexcavated, hence its omission in Roberts’s views) he accidentally left behind a large portfolio of Nubian sketches not realizing it until well after his departure. Fortunately, this precious cache would be retrieved and returned to the artist by his servant within four days, an eternity no doubt to Roberts, whose whole vast scheme was now in dire jeopardy. A greatly relieved Roberts finally settled down in Cairo for a further six weeks, where he now took the time to capture what he thought the most interesting architectural aspects of the city. (Upon arrival, he was heartened by a letter from his daughter notifying him of his elevation to full member of the Royal Academy, which would take effect in 1840.) Through the generosity of Muhammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, he had been given unprecedented access to the mosque interiors, provided that he wear only Turkish dress and refrained from using brushes made from pigs’ bristles. “Having taken such a long journey, I must not stick at trifles,” he wrote, donning a cashmere shawl around his head while shaving off his sideburns. These sketches of Cairo remain invaluable, as they not only document many monuments never seen before by most westerners, they preserve many views that have either been altered irrevocably or disappeared. One such sketch also provided Roberts with a memory he would look back on with great relief. While drawing the interior of the Mosque of El Ghoree, Roberts noticed a group of weavers adding a motif in bright gold to a large silk garment. Letting his curiosity get the better of him, he knelt down to touch the fabric. Immediately the ensuing silence alerted him to having committed a grave error as he noticed his Egyptian escort put his finger to his lip and then draw it across his throat. Although he instinctively bowed and slowly retreated backwards out of the room, his mortification can be vividly appreciated from his own words on 6 January: “It makes my hair stand on end to think what terrifying punishment would have been inflicted on me for my involuntary crime if it had become known that the sacred drapery had been contaminated by the touch of an infidel, a Christian dog, and I had been caught.”
With the first part of his journey now completed, Roberts made preparations for his excursion into the Holy Land. This would involve traveling by small caravan through the Sinai desert, sleeping in tents (in Egypt, save Cairo, most of his nights were spent aboard the dhahabiyeh) and not without the risk of having own’s throat slit by marauding bedouin tribes. Thus, having made the acquaintance in Cairo of a Mr. J. Pell and Mr. J.W. Kinnear, the three travelers left Cairo on 8 February 1839, together with David’s newly-formed friend, Hanafee Ismail Effendi, a young Egyptian convert to Christianity. Along with respective hired servants, twenty-one camels and nearly as many Arabs of the Beni Saids tribe, they donned Arab dress and began the long trek to Palestine by way of Suez, Mount Sinai and Petra. It took ten days of desert trekking to reach St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. There they remained five days, during which time Roberts drew sketches that would become some of the Holy Land’s most memorable plates. Now on to Petra, that legendary rock-carved city that had only become known to westerners since its “discovery” by the Swiss orientalist Johann Burckhardt in 1812 (one year later he would also rediscover the Great Temple at Abu Simbel). Through the permission of the local sheik (and ample “backsheesh”) Roberts’s group was allowed to encamp within the ruined city itself. This was a rare opportunity as previous travelers were hurriedly escorted through (no doubt because of the danger of warring local tribes) and Roberts made the most of it. Indeed, he was so struck by the grandeur of the rock city with its pink and orange hues that even the monuments of Egypt began to pale beside them: “I am more and more astonished and bewildered with this extraordinary city...I have often thrown my pencil away in despair of even being able to convey any idea of this extraordinary place.” But he succeeded, turning one of his drawings, the famous entrance to Petra, el Khasne (often called the “Treasury”) into the set’s most coveted lithograph.
On to southern Palestine, Hebron and Gaza, where Roberts parted from Kinnear. The orchards of olives and oranges were a refreshing sight after so much desert. In Jaffa horses were traded for camels, while Roberts, going on to Jerusalem, passed through “richly cultivated country. The ground...carpeted with flowers, the plain...studded with small villages and groups of palm trees...the country is the loveliest I ever beheld.”
Reaching Jerusalem at Easter, Roberts was lucky to ingratiate himself with the local Turkish governor, whose permission gave Roberts liberty to sketch all the sights he wished around the city as well as Bethany, Jericho, and Bethlehem (he was even invited personally to accompany the governor on an outing of pilgrims who plunged naked into the river Jordon). While his original itinerary called for him to end his journey in Damascus, Roberts caught a fever while riding to Baalbec in a driving rain, sketching the magnificent ruins while barely being able to stand or even eat. (So overcome by the ruins’s splendor, he could not be persuaded to rest. Lucky for us, as one of his Baalbec sketches, the famous Temple Door, remains one of the series’s most sought-after prints.) But, exhausted, Roberts prudently decided he would have to begin the journey home. So, sailing from Lebanon to Alexandria (where he again met with the British Consul General and Muhammad Ali), he then continued on to Malta (where he was quarantined for three weeks) and finally, on to England where he would write, “Landed safely, thank God, in London, on the 21st of July [1839], having been eleven months absent.” Roberts wasted little time in pursuing his ambition to have the sketches published. Yet his earlier publishers, Finden and John Murray respectfully declined, citing the enormous cost (£10,000). Roberts refused to consider a less pricey presentation as an alternative. He had previously written to his friend Robert Sconce while in Malta, that there were many publishers interested in his work: "My sketches in the East have taken the world of art here by storm. I am besieged by Publishers, but am Stoic enough to reject them all." Roberts was willing to wait for the right publisher as he believed he had assembled "one of the richest folios that ever left the east." He eventually signed a contract - selling exclusive rights to his sketches - with Francis G. Moon for £3,000, a huge sum equal to $14,400 at the time and equivalent to more than $400,000 today (trying to adjust moneys from one era to another is a very tricky business - the adventurous reader may wish to explore http://eh.net/hmit/compare/). Moon himself would invest nearly £50,000 - a dizzying sum in today’s currency probably not less than several millions of dollars. Because of Roberts’s reputation, however, and with the help of large-scale exhibitions of his sketches and paintings from the Holy Land and Egypt in both London and Edinburgh (paid for by the publisher), a subscription of wealthy patrons was already in place - nearly twice the figure quoted by his earlier, disinterested, publisher - before the first plate rolled of the press (among them was Queen Victoria, for years an ardent fan and to whom the Holy Land series is dedicated; the Egypt set is dedicated to King Louis Philippe of France). In 1842, Moon proudly announced the series with the following notice: “The Holy Land: Views in Palestine, Egypt and Syria, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts, R.A., with historical and descriptive notes by the Rev. George Groly, LLD., Rector of St. Stephens’s. London. This work will be published in parts, each containing six facsimiles of the original drawings, executed in lithography under the inspection of the artist at £ 1.10.0; proofs £ sterling 1.11.6 and a few copies, coloured and mounted in imitation of the original drawings in a portfolio at £ sterling 2.2.0.” The work required a team of woman artists carefully colouring each lithograph that had been prepared by Louis Haghe, assisted by his brother Charles. The entire set (with nearly 250 separate lithographs equally divided between the Holy Land and Egypt) was completed only in 1849, thus taking nearly eight years of intensive labour and devotion by the many individuals engaged.
As for Roberts, his artistic star grew brighter as he was increasingly honoured internationally, becoming a member of at least nine societies and academies, including one in America, the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia. With fame came fortune, more exhibitions and travels to Italy and later, to Belgium (the latter with Haghe). In 1858 he was presented with the Freedom of the city of Edinburgh. The last years of his life were occupied with a series of views of London from the Thames. He had executed six of these, and was at work upon a picture of St. Paul's Cathedral, when he died suddenly of apoplexy at the age of sixty-eight, on 25 November, 1864. He is buried in Norwood Cemetery.Not long before his death, Roberts wrote to a friend: "My only child is well and happy with the best of husbands, surrounded by a host of fine children. I am now enjoying the greatest of blessings, health! My foot is placed on the highest spoke of the artistic ladder and as yet without a rival in my own department. It would be strange indeed, if in my old age, with all these blessings, I did not feel happy." And yet one senses a restless ambiguity in those words. Indeed, a life, however successful, without a companion, can be a lonely one, especially to the sensitive soul. Such was the fate of David Roberts. The above material on David Roberts as well as that on Louis Haghe and the publication history of the Holy Land and Egypt & Nubia prints is adapted from several sources: an anonymously authored text from the Colorado State University (Pueblo) web site; Wikipedia (web site encyclopedia); the introduction (by Hans Schneider) to an abridged 2-vol. facsimile edition of Holy Land and Egypt & Nubia published by Pulchri Press, Leiden; Roberts of the Prints by John Brinton in the magazine ARAMCO (February, 1970); Egypt: Yesterday and Today by Fabrio Bourbion; Oxford Dictionary of National Biograpy; J. R. Abbey, Travel in Aquantint and Lithogrpahy (2 vols., Curwen Press, London 1956 - 7); Byran's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (vol III), (see also Friedman, Joan M., Color Printing in England, New haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1978, for a discussion of Haghe's work as a reproductive lithographer).
View of Edinburgh, Painting - David Roberts
These and the following examples show how closely the lithographer Haghe followed Roberts's original sketches. Each print often required more than one stone (all done in reverse to the original) to capture different tones, e.g. black, white, ochre, and pink or tan. The registration (i.e. the placement of the sheet of paper to each successive stone) had to remain perfect throughout as the slightest variation would permanently “blur” the image, rendering it unacceptable. The final result would then (in the deluxe edition) be hand-coloured, as shown here.
W h o w a s D a v i d R o b e r t s ?
Roberts was obviously highly motivated and ambitious (in addition to possessing a formidable talent). He knew that success would come only through hard work and tremendous discipline. Luckily he was able to combine both for much of the remainder of his life. In 1823, aged 26, he moved permanently to London where he worked for the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1824, he exhibited his first picture for the British Institution, a highly coveted gallery featuring only the finest works, in 1824. He would also become a founding member of the new Society of British Artists. that success would come only through hard work and tremendous discipline. Luckily he was able to combine both for much of the remainder of his life. In 1823, aged 26, he moved permanently to London where he worked for the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1824, he exhibited his first picture for the British Institution, a highly coveted gallery featuring only the finest works, in 1824. He would also become a founding member of the new Society of British Artists.
The year 1824 was an important one in David’s life. That year he made his first trip to Europe, sketching many of the monuments and cathedrals with great, almost photographic precision. When he returned, he turned these sketches into his first real “romantic travel” paintings, then in great vogue. Some were exhibited and sold in ever-increasing prices. Soon he had his first patron, Lord Northwick; his work was reviewed (favorably) in The Times. Yet he was still obliged to continue painting stage scenery, albeit now at the prestigious Covent Garden (his seventeen scenes for their production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio in 1826 created a sensation and made his name nationally known). In 1827, the newly-founded Royal Scottish Academy exhibited his paintings and in 1830 he was elected president of the Society of British Artists. Saving his money (and on the advice of a friend and fellow Scot artist David Wilkie), Roberts set out for Spain in 1832, then a relatively little-known country to most Britons. 
Cairo from the West, painting
Cairo from the West, lithograph
E3, painting
under the Portico of the Temple of Edfu
