David Roberts R.A.

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, 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.

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. 

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. 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.