Petra, 1840

In 1838, a well-known stage painter and decorative artist named David Roberts set sail for Egypt and West Asia, eager to see the wonders of the ‘Orient’ and paint scenes that might interest his patrons back home. Egypt was much in vogue at the time due to the interest of antiquarians and treasure hunters. Roberts spent a couple of years travelling through Nubia, the Sinai, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon, producing many landscapes, especially of ‘exotic’ monuments like the pyramids, the Church of the Holy Sepulchure in Jerusalem and Thebes. One new addition to the ‘Holy Land’ merry-go-round was Petra, in Jordan.

First introduced to western audiences by a Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1812, Petra became an immediate hit with western audiences, and Roberts wouldn’t leave the region without seeing this wonder. Quite naturally, he drew it too, with Arab figures in the foreground setting the scene in classic oriental tropes. In his zeal to idealise the monument, Roberts gets the scale completely wrong, as well as the exact nature of the surrounding geography, but he does capture the wonder of this ancient monument.