David Roberts R.A.

George Knott (commissioned from the artist)
His Sale: Christie’s, London, 26 April 1845, lot 53
Joseph Arden (purchased at the above sale; sale: Christie’s, London, 26 April 1879, lot 71)
J.W. Birch (purchased at the above sale)
Mrs James Allen (sale: Sotheby’s, London, 14 April 1976, lot 13)
Purchased by the present owner circa 1976

London, British Institution, 1841, no. 108 (as Street in Cairo)

Literary Gazette, 30 January 1841, p. 76
Literary Gazette, 6 February 1841, p. 92
Art Union, 1841, p. 29
Art Union, 1845, p. 173
Art Journal, 1857, p. 311 ('Visit to Joseph Arden')
James Ballantine, The life of David Roberts, R.A., Edinburgh, 1866, no. 105, (as Bazaar of the Coppersmiths, Cairo), p. 249 and p. 144
William Roberts, Memorials of Christie’s: a record of art sales from 1766 to 1896, London, 1897, Vol. I, p. 304
Olga Nefedova, A Journey into the World of the Ottomans: The Art of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671-1737), Milan, 2009, p. 19, fig. 5, illustrated

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd., 13 and 14 Mason's Yard, St James', London, SW1Y 6BU: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE The canvas has been lined. and is securely attached to a keyed wooden stretcher. An inscription is visible through the transparent lining in the upper half of the composition when viewed from the reverse. The lining is rather hard and unsympathetic and the painting could be relined but this would probably necessitate obscuring the inscription. There is a pattern of slightly raised craquelure visible throughout the composition. However, this is stable. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows small scattered retouchings the most significant of which are: 1) three diagonal lines of retouching in the upper centre of the sky, 2) two small retouchings above the architecture towards the upper centre of the right vertical framing edge, 3) spots and lines within the red and white masonry of the building in the left of the composition, 4) small spots and lines between the buildings within the sky in the lower centre of the composition, 5) small, carefully applied lines of retouching above and to the right of the minaret, and 6) spots and lines of retouching around the seated figure towards the centre of the lower edge of the composition. Other small retouchings are also visible. The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition. Presented in a decorative gilt frame.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The present work is one of the earliest of a small group of important Cairo street views that David Roberts painted in the 1840s, the majority of which are now in public collections. These include The Gate and Mosque of the Mutawellee, Grand Cairo, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, where it was purchased by Queen Victoria (it remains in the Royal Collection); Gate of the Mosque of Metwáles, Grand Cairo (fig. 2), exhibited at the RA in 1843 and acquired by John Sheepshanks (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum); and A Street in Cairo, exhibited RA 1846, and acquired later in the century by Thomas Holloway, founder of Royal Holloway College (University of London).

Roberts knew that first-hand views of the ‘City of the Caliphs’, familiar to his public’s imaginations through their readings of the Arabian Nights’  tales, would prove popular subjects for paintings.  E.W. Lane’s recently published compendium, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), had shown that the exotic Oriental stories were grounded in real life and the public were eager for authentic visual images of the places familiar to them from literature.  Roberts was one of the first professional artists to travel to the Near East specifically to meet the demand for paintings of Islamic Cairo as well as ancient Egyptian and biblical sites. These, including the present work, he subsequently exhibited to great acclaim at such venues as the Royal Academy and the British Institution.

Roberts arrived in Egypt in 1838, and soon embarked on a journey up the Nile. On his return to Cairo in December of that year, he was determined to augment his already valuable portfolio of sketches of ancient Egyptian monuments with views of the colourful buildings of the Islamic city. ‘Subjects of another class of equal interest remain yet at Cairo– and equally untrodden ground…. I think much may be made of the splendid mosques, the tombs of the Mamalooks, Caliphs etc’ (19 December 1838, MS Eastern Journal, National Library of Scotland). It was not an easy task, since a European sketching openly in the crowded streets was the subject of curiosity, if not hostility: he was ‘jostled and stared at until I came home quite sick’, but he was hopeful that his sketches would ‘add to the general knowledge already acquired of the general styles of Architecture existing in different ages’ (1 January 1839, MS Eastern Journal).  Despite the difficult conditions and his bewilderment at the ‘extraordinarily picturesque nature of the streets and buildings of this most wonderful of all cities’ (28 December 1838, MS Eastern Journal), he made a visual survey of many of the Islamic monuments, changing into Ottoman dress and observing local proprieties in order to draw inside the mosques.  On 29 December he made ‘two large drawings one of a Street leading to the Mosque containing the Lunatic Asylum and another of the same Street opposite, they are glorious subjects …’ (MS Eastern Journal)  The present work is probably based on one of these. 

Bazaar of the Coppersmiths, Cairo was exhibited at the British Institution in 1841 under the less specific title of ‘Street in Cairo’.  In general, Roberts’s Cairo scenes were well-received, but responding to the criticism that this work was ‘too unfinished for exhibition’ (Art Union, 1841, p. 29), Roberts noted that he had retouched the painting and ‘greatly improved’ it (Roberts Record Book, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), probably re-dating it to 1842 at this time.  Shortly afterwards, on the death of the prosperous wholesale grocer, George Knott, it was acquired by the wealthy lawyer, Joseph Arden of Rickmansworth Park in Hertfordshire and Cavendish Square, London, who had a notable collection of modern British paintings, and who subsequently visited Egypt where he purchased Egyptian papyri. Arden’s collection was among those described by the Art Journal in their series of ‘Visits’, the commentary on Roberts’s painting reflecting the general appreciation of the artist’s Oriental subjects at that time: ‘A large picture, showing an open space inclosed by lofty houses, painted with alternate lines of red and yellow, all telling effectively in the composition, in their variety of  line, form, and quantity.  The place is thronged with figures, every one of which is a successful sketch from the life, and nothing can be more purely oriental and Turkish than these turbaned idlers, whose acquaintance we make here.  Mr. Roberts describes the Turks with a truth and gusto …’(Art Journal, 1857, p. 311).

In the same decade that Roberts painted these scenes of Islamic Cairo, he devoted an entire volume of The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (1842-49) to the city’s monuments. The entire series, comprising 248 tinted lithographs, was one of the most ambitious and successful publishing ventures of the nineteenth century, and has ensured him lasting fame.  One of the lithographs in the Cairo volume of Egypt & Nubia (vol. III, 1849, plate 104) is entitled Bazaar of the Coppersmiths, Cairo, and shows an almost identical viewpoint to the oil painting, but with a different arrangement of figures.

The area known to Westerners as the Bazaar of the Coppersmiths was the Sharia al-Nahhasin (Arabic for coppersmiths), part of Sharia Mu'izz id-Din Allah, the Qasaba or the great ceremonial high street of Fatimid Cairo upon which subsequent rulers built.  The building most prominent on the left of Roberts’s painting is part of the façade of the Madrasa of Baybars, 1262-63. Since this building was destroyed in 1874, Roberts’s depiction of it is valuable as documentary evidence. In the centre is the Sabil-Kuttab of Khusraw Pasha, which still stands today (fig.1).  Behind this is the Madrasa-Mausoleum of al-Salih Nagm al-Din Ayyub, last of the Ayyubi dynasty, with its distinctive minaret rising above (see Caroline Williams, Islamic Monuments in Cairo: the Practical Guide, Cairo and New York, 2008, pp. 182-185).

We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for preparing this catalogue entry.