A Victorian in the orient.

The Victorians were fascinated by scenes of far-off lands, in particular by what was perceived as "exotic Arabia". During the late 18th and early 19th century, following Napoleon's Invasion of Europe, and the opening-up of overland trade routes to India for foreigners, hitherto unvisited countries drew artists and archaeologists from Britain and France in particular.

Following the example of so many British artists before him, David Roberts (1796-1864), regularly travelled in Europe in search of new subjects. But unlike most of his contemporaries, he ventured to the Middle East and North Africa, under conditions which at the time were often arduous, dangerous, and potentially injurious to the health of a northern European.

In 1838 David Roberts, who hailed from Scotland, arrived in Egypt, and by 1839 had reached Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. As an early biographer, James Ballantine, wrote of Roberts' visit to what is referred to in Biblical terms as The Holy Land: "he explored that patriarchal land, he searched its innermost recesses and returned to his native country laden with the richest treasures after having completed the finest pilgrimage of art. He was the first and greatest artistic pioneer who had opened up that sacred country to our kin."

The publication of Roberts' six volumes of lithographs, The Holy Land, Syria, Idunmea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia between 1842 and 1849, met with huge success and critical acclaim. These same lithographs are today much respected and sought-after by collectors of antiquarian landscapes; and red spots were spreading like measles at the Private View for a recent exhibition of Roberts' work in London. The Mathaf Gallery in London's Motcomb Street is the major supplier of David Roberts' lithographs, (as well as water-colours and oils), the rare authenticated subscription edition and first edition hand-coloured ones.

Admirers of these splendid lithographs based in the Middle East will soon have the opportunity to view the private collection of Dr Hisham Al-Khatib. To celebrate 50 years of cultural activity in Jordan, the British Council will be displaying his collection at their auditorium in Amman in late November for two weeks. The exhibition is to be opened by a member of the British royal family.

One may very well ask how and why a Scotsman came to be travelling round the Orient, sketch-pad in hand. Born in Stockbridge in 1796, Roberts emerged from humble circumstances, his father a shoe-maker; but interestingly, his mother an admirer of the Cathedral and monastic remains of her native St Andrew's, which enthusiasm she communicated to her son. He had shown an early aptitude for drawing and there was scarcely an old castle or ruined chapel in his area that Roberts did not sketch as a boy. Some of these talented drawings were shown to the Master of the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh, who advised, "that as the parents of the boy were poor, he had best be apprenticed to a house-painter, where he might still practice drawing, and learn an art by which he could make his living."

And so Roberts served a long, harsh apprenticeship with an overbearing master, Gavin Beugo. Yet those challenging seven years further stimulated Roberts' incipient passion for architecture, plunging deeper than the surface decoration with which he was involved as a house-painter and interior decorator.

By 1818 Roberts had become an assistant scene painter in a minor Edinburgh theatre, fairly rapidly graduating to principal painter in leading Scots theatres. The dizzy heights of Drury Lane and then Covent garden, London, beckoned, where as chief theatrical painter, he adapted to southern trends. The form of fashionable entertainment during the 1820's was `panoramas' and `dioramas', a genre that originated in London and combined in a contemporary art form the Georgian and Victorian enthusiasms for spectacle and travel.

Later, his experience with handling architectural subjects on a vast scale for stage scenery was to prove invaluable. He comments in his journal that the task of communicating the grandeur and scale of some of the monuments he was recording was "impossible." He writes of the "stupendous" rocks at Petra, and of conveying the dimensions of the huge columns at Karnak. Again, in his journal he wrote, "you must be under them (the columns) and look up and walk round them" to gain a true impression of their grandeur. In a sense, many of the viewpoints and artistic licence taken in his work reflect his legacy of scenery painting. In his water-colour of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, for instance, he takes a low viewpoint to achieve an almost claustrophobic sensation of those huge columns soaring up above the small figures below.

Meanwhile during this period of his life as a scenery painter, Roberts had begun to take up painting seriously, exhibiting and receiving increasingly fulsome academic accolades, elected as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1838, becoming a full member in 1841. After travelling to France, Spain and other European centres of antique architectural splendour, and painting them to considerable acclaim, he began preparing for the most important event of his life, the journey to the Orient. After drawing almost every edifice from Nubia to the Mediterranean, he prepared to cross the desert by the route of the ancient flight of the Israelites from Egypt to Mount Sinai, via southern Jordan, touching Aqaba and Petra, and then to Palestine. Roberts and his party dressed themselves as Arabs and left Cairo "well-armed with 21 camels, and nearly as many Bedouin Arabs." Roberts wrote in his journal, "I am so completely transmogrified in appearance that my dear old mother would never know me."

It was one of Roberts' achievements to familiarise a new and appreciative audience with the look and feel of foreign places, a window that the Romantic poets like Byron and Scott had opened.

Roberts was well aware of the potential commercial value of images of Egyptian temples, Islamic mosques, and the ruins and landscape of the Holy Land. His sketches of them would make "one of the richest folios that ever left the East." However romantic his response to the magnificent sights of the Orient, It was based on the sound practical knowledge that his journey would bring him fame and fortune, since no artist of his calibre had previously attempted such an ambitious topographical project.

As Teddy Kolek, mayor of Jerusalem, said of his city, "For centuries Jerusalem has been sketched, painted, photographed ... And yet when people envision Jerusalem, very often what they envisage is Jerusalem as painted by David Roberts, 140 years ago. He succeeded so ably in capturing the beauty of the city, its special quality, its special colours."

Roberts' melancholy comparisons of past grandeur and present decay of the great monuments of the Orient were typical of his time, deriving from the Romantic attitude to ruins (not only those of the Near East). Yet despite his exquisite drawing and perfect composition, the accomplished Roberts was decidedly not an imaginative artist. His lithographs, watercolours and oils are not the inspired masterpieces Turner might have created. He is essentially a prosaic, professional Victorian, working within the conventions of his time. His great success lay in recognising his limitations and making clarity of perception a virtue. That sheer professionalism appealed to early Victorian England with its connotations of honest, industrial toil.

Roberts has his detractors, and one of the accusations laid against him by art critics is that he `used' people as foreground interest. But the genuine Roberts response might have been that human figures add interest and perspective, giving a further dimension to an otherwise austere landscape, and he readily admitted that figure painting was not his strong point.

Further artistic licence was taken to achieve greater dramatic impact and to re-create the mood that the subject itself evoked -- these were not mere topographical records.

Witness his exaggeration of the height and width of buildings, by altering proportions and reducing the scale of figures. He would also use colourful weather conditions to create stunning effects. His most successful compositions seem to be those which combine his sense of drama, derived from his experience as a stage scenery painter, with his considerable powers of observation, perfected when depicting the intricate tracery of Gothic and Moorish architecture.