William Simpson’s large watercolour, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, brings together both historical and contemporary Jerusalem in an impressive composition. The uninterrupted vista of the sacred city, seen across the Kidron Valley, and the biblical associations of the location, made this a popular viewpoint for many artists. Among them the better-known David Roberts and Edward Lear, with whose images Simpson’s compares well. From the rocky foreground, peopled with local figures, to the extraordinarily detailed depiction of the city behind the walls, to the dramatic Turneresque sky, Simpson’s watercolour draws out the expressive qualities of the well-known landscape.
In an age that produced many notable polymaths, Simpson was one of the most remarkable. He had an astonishing range of accomplishments. First and foremost was his artistic ability: it was his skills as a documentary artist and pioneer war reporter that first brought him recognition, and for which he continued to be known, in particular as a ‘special artist’ for the Illustrated London News. In addition over the course of his long life he achieved success as a linguist, a writer, a religious scholar, an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a historian. He also became a Freemason, his career benefitting from the network of contacts that the organisation provided. At a time when many people risked hardship and danger to journey far and wide, his travels stand out as among the most intrepid. He visited places as distant as India, Afghanistan, China, America and Ethiopia, as well as many closer to home, often during times of conflict, on purpose to extract the truth of events on the ground. Whether making drawings that depicted war or peace, verisimilitude was his goal, as he later wrote: ‘I may have to tell you a plain and simple story, but you may trust to it as a true one’ (Experiences, c.1879, MS, Mitchell Library, Glasgow).
Born into obscurity in a Glasgow tenement, he came to be on familiar terms with members of the British nobility, with the Prince of Wales and with Queen Victoria herself. He trained as a lithographer and in 1851 moved to London to work for the firm of Day & Son. His success there just as the Crimean War was beginning to unfold, led to him being despatched to the field of battle in 1854 by the print-sellers, Colnaghi & Son, as the first war artist to record events on the ground as they happened. He made sketches at Balaklava and at Sevastopol during the siege, sending his watercolours back to London. The following year these were published as lithographs in The Seat of War in the East (eventually, two volumes of 80 plates, 1855-56, dedicated to Queen Victoria). After a trip to Circassia with the Duke of Newcastle, he returned home, sporting a long brown beard; the success of the lithographic series earned him the soubriquet ‘Crimean Simpson’. With public attention shifted to India after the ‘Mutiny’, Simpson was sent there in 1859 to make sketches for a proposed publication intended to rival David Roberts’s monumental Holy Land in size and scope. Although he completed 250 watercolours, which were exhibited in London to great acclaim, the project failed to materialise when the firm of Day & Son went into liquidation, and Simpson received no recompense for seven years of hard work.
Some consolation came in 1866 when the Illustrated London News appointed him as their ‘special artist’, to record events of interest throughout the world. From the Abyssinian Campaign in 1868 to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Afghan War of 1878-79, few conflicts of British interest escaped Simpson’s scrutiny. In 1872-73 he circumnavigated the globe, sailing to China to report on the marriage of the Emperor, continuing on via Japan to California and across America via Salt Lake City and Kentucky to New York. His account of the journey, Meeting the Sun: A Journey All Round The World, was published in 1874, two years after Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in Eighty Days. He covered numerous state events connected with the British royal family – coronations, marriages, funerals – and accompanied the Prince of Wales to India in 1875-76. The numerous well-observed and detailed pencil sketches that he made on the spot provided the raw material that he worked up after his return into accomplished watercolours, many of which were reproduced in the ILN.
At the end of 1868 the ILN sent Simpson to cover the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Egypt and to record the construction of the Suez Canal. His task completed, he discovered that Captain Charles Warren was excavating underneath Jerusalem for the recently-founded Palestine Exploration Fund. Plans and reports were being sent back to the ILN, but the paper needed visual material to bring to life the remarkable discoveries that were being made. With that in mind, Simpson took a steamer from Port Said to Jaffa and, despite an injury from a kicking horse, reached Jerusalem in March 1869. He had some familiarity with the city from illustrations he had made for the Revd George Sandie’s Horeb and Jerusalem (1864), but he had never visited it himself. What he saw astonished him. Guided by Warren, he explored the subterranean labyrinths beneath the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif. Together they scrambled through tunnels that the PEF team had dug and entered caves and cisterns they had recently excavated, lighting magnesium wire so that Simpson could see to sketch by the eerie light that this provided. As usual, his pencil drawings, examples of which are in the Victoria and Albert Museum (SD.977) and at the Yale Center for British Art (B1977.14.3430), are full of closely-observed detail. On his return to England, the watercolours that he made of the dramatic spaces, some huge and cavernous, others narrow and terrifyingly precipitate, evoke the excitement of discovery. They are testament to Simpson’s considerable skills in employing watercolour to convey with complete conviction the complex perspectives and striking light effects that he witnessed (Autobiography, 1903, pp.210‑14, and ILN, 24 April 1869, pp.423‑6). The forty watercolours exhibited under the title, Underground Jerusalem, at the Pall Mall Gallery in 1872, also included several of the interior of the Dome of the Rock, where he had been granted rare permission to sketch.
The expansive watercolour of Jerusalem that Simpson made on his return from the same trip is very different from the Underground Jerusalem series, but no less remarkable. The view looks west towards the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif and the sunset sky beyond. Yet our attention is first caught by the group of figures in the right foreground, present-day inhabitants who include a young Palestinian woman, a middle-aged Orthodox Jew, and an elderly Muslim cleric, standing on a rocky outcrop beside some unmarked Jewish tombs. A shepherd and his flock are seen on the hillside below to the left, symbols of a timeless human activity. In the middle ground, the viewpoint’s biblical reference is reinforced by the conical roof of the so-called Tomb of Absalom, part of a complex of tombs cut into the side of what Simpson and his contemporaries would have known as the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Modern scholarship, however, dates the tomb later, to the 1st century CE. The side of the valley is criss-crossed with paths, denoting further human activity. Above this is the city itself, enclosed by its prominent wall, in which the Golden Gate can be seen to the right, with more tombs, probably Muslim, below. As one might expect, the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif, equally sacred to both Muslims and Jews, occupies the most prominent position in the picture, with the large Dome of the Rock in the centre and to its left the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Between them in the distance and almost at the perspectival vanishing point is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is likely no coincidence that Simpson has angled his view so as to place this, the building in Jerusalem that was of the greatest significance for his Christian audience, at the focal point of his composition. So detailed is Simpson’s depiction of the city that many other buildings can be identified, among them, from left to right on the horizon, ‘King David’s Tomb’ and Coenaculum (or Cenacle), St James’s Cathedral, the Citadel, and, to the right of the Holy Sepulchre, the Russian Compound. The most prominent landmark to the right of the Dome of the Rock is the Minaret of Al-Ghawanima (Bani Ghanim), one of four minarets on the Temple Mount (my thanks to Felicity Cobbing and Evie Cranbridge of the Palestine Exploration Fund, for these identifications).
In devoting such careful attention to the site that was at the heart of the ‘Landscape of Belief’ in the 19th century (John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture, 1996), Simpson would have been deliberately emulating an illustrious predecessor, David Roberts, who had exhibited the first of a series of views of Jerusalem from a similar point at the Royal Academy a quarter of a century earlier (Pilgrims approaching Jerusalem / Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, oil on canvas, 1841, Royal Holloway, University of London) and whose lithographs of the site had become universally renowned (The Holy Land …, 1842). Yet, whereas Roberts, ever the theatrical scene-painter, had emphasised or even exaggerated the dramatic terrain, and had introduced a narrative element into his oil paintings, Simpson’s view is more down-to-earth, rooted firmly in the Jerusalem of the present. Its considerable impact derives from the extraordinary observation of the city’s buildings and of the surrounding rocky terrain, unified into an atmospheric whole by the spectacular red-suffused sunset sky.
Such a large and elaborate watercolour is likely to have been painted for a patron or for exhibition, but so far this has not been confirmed. Whatever its purpose there is no doubt that it is one of the most striking and successful of Simpson’s oeuvre, a highlight in the career of one of the unsung heroes of the Victorian age.
We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for preparing this catalogue entry.
Bibliography
London, The Pall Mall Gallery, Underground Jerusalem, Descriptive Catalogue … of Water-Colour Drawings by William Simpson, 1872
William Simpson, George Eyre-Todd, ed., The Autobiography of William Simpson R.I, London: T.F. Unwin, 1903
London, The Fine Art Society, Mr. William Simpson of The Illustrated London News Pioneer War Artist 1823-1899, exhibition catalogue, text by Simon Peers, 1987
Adrian Lipscomb, ‘William Simpson (1823-1899) - “Prince of Pictorial Correspondents”’, The Victorian Web, online, https://victorianweb.org/painting/simpson/bio.html
Delia Millar, ‘William Simpson (1823-1899), watercolour painter and journalist, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-16.
Jeffry Auerbach, Underground Jerusalem, Palestine Exploration Fund, online blog, 2020, https://www.pef.org.uk/underground-jerusalem/