During a stop in York, he visited (and painted) the city's Gothic
churches, thus confirming the lasting nature of that interest in
medieval architecture that had been sparked by his mother's stories in
boyhood.
The unassuming house-painter, whose imagination had been fired by the
first plays he had seen from the gallery of the Edinburgh Theatre, and
in particular by the exotic charm of an edition of Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves, would have seemed thus to have realized his most
ambitious dreams. But in truth this was only the beginning of what was
to be a brilliant career, which in 1819 took him to the Royal Theatre of
Glasgow, the following year to the Edinburgh Theatre, and in 1822 to
London, first to the Drury Lane Theatre and then, in 1826, to Covent
Garden. Lauded by the critics (the Times defined him a genius of unusual
talent), Roberts had also begun producing canvases; he exhibited for the
first time in 1824 and was a founder of the Society of British Artists,
of which he became president in 1831. Artistic activity soon supplanted
the scene-painter's craft, just as the latter had taken precedence over
that of the decorator. But even as an artist, Roberts found ways to
satisfy his innate wanderlust. He excelled as a painter of monuments,
and in 1824 began a series of journeys, travelling in France, Belgium,
Holland and Germany, where he produced sketches and paintings that were
highly appreciated in that age before photography when drawings and
engravings were the tools for bringing far-off places into the homes of
the public. In 1832-33 he spent eleven months touring Spain. After
having visited Burgos, Madrid, Toledo, Cordova and Granada, he crossed
the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, where he received his first taste of
the oriental world and of Moorish architecture.
The journey, concluding with a lengthy sojourn in Seville, inspired a
great number of oil paintings and drawings, of which many were published
in the journal The Landscape Annual and many others in the volume
entitled Picturesque Sketches of Spain. But above all, it assured
Roberts' fame as an illustrator, and this enabled him to obtain the
funding and support he needed for making his greatest dream come true:
an expedition through Egypt and Palestine, which prepared with great
care, weighing and uniting cultural considerations and practical
necessities.
Roberts financed his travels with the profits from sales of his works on
Spain, and counted heavily, for "marketing" his drawings and paintings,
on the renewed interest expressed by Romantic Europe in exotic
scenarios, on the re-discovery of Egyptian civilization following
Champollion's unlocking of the theretofore unintelligible hieroglyphic
code, on the eternal fascination exerted by the Holy Land and its
monuments and that air of mystery that surrounded certain sites such as
the fabulous Petra, the existence of which had been made known only very
recently by an adventurous Swiss archaeologist. And for his journey
Roberts was also able to count on the relative political stability of
the area after Mehemet Ali, Pasha or Viceroy of Egypt, had extended his
dominion to embrace the Holy Land and had initiated a process of
modernization and assured conditions of greater tolerance toward
Christian peoples.
Roberts sailed from Marseilles, whither he had arrived from Paris, and
reached Alexandria - via Civitavecchia and Malta - on 24 September 1838.
Together with a British couple, he rented a boat for three months to
ascend the Nile - and was forced to literally "sink" it to free it from
the rats with which it was infested. The boat, which cost the party
fifteen pounds sterling per month, including the wages of the eight crew
members, took the artist as far as Nubia and to the temples of Abu
Simbel. There followed a long sojourn in Cairo, during which Roberts was
the first Christian visitor to obtain permission to visit the mosques
and to paint them. In the Egyptian capital he met John Pell and John G.
Kinnear, two fellow British subjects, in whose company he decided to
continue his trip to the Holy Land -or rather to Syria, as the entire
area delimited by the Mediterranean Sea, the Euphrates, Asia Minor, the
Arabian peninsula and Egypt was then called. The journey was conducted
in conditions of extreme discomfort for a Westerner, and lasted from 7
February through 13 May 1839, when Roberts boarded ship for Alexandria,
where he met Mehemet Ali.
Roberts landed in England on 21 July, with 272 drawings, a panorama of
Cairo, three notebooks of sketches and a journal of his travels that his
daughter Christine copied over and which is today preserved in the
National Library of Scotland. In 1841, Roberts was elected Full Member
of the Royal Academy. The exhibit of the watercolors and drawings he had
made during his journey aroused enthusiastic commentary that pointed up
the technical perfection and the skilful draftsmanship of the work: its
photographic accuracy, as we would say today. The Scottish Standard, for
example, in a review of the Edinburgh show, observed how in not a one of
the original drawings was "a blemish or slip of the pencil...
discernible. His touch seems magical." And the Spectator commented that
"the artist has felt the sentiment of the scenes with the mind of a poet
and depicted them with the accuracy of a draughtsman."
Immediately thereafter, on the tide of popular and critical success,
commercial exploitation of the work began - although it was more to the
benefit of the editor, Sir F G. Moon, than the author. Moon, strong in
the knowledge that he could count on a long list of subscribers, offered
Roberts the sum of three thousand pounds sterling for the publishing
rights in the drawings and their adaptation as lithographs by the
Belgian engraver Louis Haghe. The amount, however conspicuous, repaid
the artist only in part for the expense and danger of the journey - but
in exchange, publication of the work assured Roberts' fame throughout
Europe. Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land, published in monthly
installments from 1842 through 1849, made Roberts one of the most famous
artists of the Victorian era. He was received at Court, was on excellent
terms with many of the greatest artists and writers of the age, from
Turner to Dickens and Thackeray, and boasted a clientele of wealthy
businessmen as well as titled nobility and crowned heads. The former
house-painter continued to travel, although all his later journeys were
shorter and all within Europe. In 1843 he went to France, Belgium and
Holland; in 1851 to northern Italy; two years later to Rome and Naples;
and later again to Belgium and Paris. When he died, on 25 November 1864,
the fame of this slow-speaking Scotsman with such a sure hand with a
pencil, who generously aided novice artists and whom the Times
considered "the best architectural painter that our country has yet
produced," was still intact. The end of the Victorian era condemned
Roberts, like many other protagonists of that era, to temporary
oblivion. But today his paintings are again very much sought-after and
his drawings have preserved intact the charm of a lost world, in which a
journey through the Orient was still an adventure and such marvels as
the temples of the Valley of Kings or the Holy Sepulchre were known to
the public at large only through the mediation of art.
Enrico Nistri
