Siwa Oasis Reviews

David Roberts, one of the most skilled landscape artists of his time, set out for Egypt in 1838, where he made countless sketches of the most remarkable sites and monuments during the course of his eleven-month journey through Egypt, Sinai, and the Levant. Superb lithographs made from his work, first published between 1846 and 1848, are richly reproduced here in resplendent color, along with Roberts’s diary accounts of his travels along the Nile Valley from Alexandria to the fabulous Abu Simbel temples. Each illustration is accompanied by a photograph showing the same view more than 150 years later. Fabio Bourbon’s lucid essay introduces anew this nineteenth-century fine artist and contextualizes his images for the modern reader.

David Roberts, born in 1796 near Edinburgh, was one of the most acclaimed landscape painters of the nineteenth century. In 1838 he left Europe for Egypt, where he drew all the main archaeological sites and Islamic monuments. These superb lithographs taken from his sketches and first published in London between 1842 and 1849 are a fine essay on his virtuosity and represent an unforgettable journey through time along the Nile Valley and across the Sinai peninsula.