“When people envision Jerusalem, very often what they envision is Jerusalem painted by David Roberts.”
Out of the romance of napoleon’s ill-fated 198 adventure in Egypt and Lord Byron’s Eastern travels, memorialized in his exotic poetry came a fascination for the Near East. It was a fascination that touched Scotsman David Roberts, the leading landscape painter of his day. The appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious East, still relatively unseen by Western eyes, set Roberts inexorably on the course that would determine his immortality. As a member of the Royal Academy of Arts Roberts was given unfettered access to the tombs, temples, monuments and ruins of Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land.
Tinted in color and published a few short years before the advent of photography, these images permanently fixed in the popular imagination such sites as the great Sphinx of Giza and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We offer an exceptional first quarto edition of Roberts’s Holy Land, three volumes in beautiful publisher’s morocco-gilt.
My father, an interior decorator, in perhaps the 1970′s, bought a complete volume of Roberts views of the holy land published by Scribner’s which he then dismantled to sell framed to his clients. We,his children each recieved prints from the book. My family would be interested in purchasing the volumes you have advertised if they are equivalent to what we have. If they are still available what size are the volumns? Did Scribner’s have any part in their publication? I am assuming they must be bought as a set. Is this correct? Thank you for the information. Suzanne Jones