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Geographies of Contact

 | 
Caroline Lehni
, 
Fanny Moghaddassi
, 
Hélène Ibata
, 
et al.

IV. Sites Turned into Sights

British Travellers in the Isthmus of Suez, from Napoleon’s Campaign (1798) to the Construction of the Canal (1859)

Hélène Braeuner
Traduction de Jean-Yves Bart

Texte intégral

  • 1 Hélène Braeuner, “Les représentations du canal de Suez (xve-xxe siècles): esthétiques et politiques (...)
  • 2 Du Bois-Aymé, Notice sur le séjour des Hébreux en Égypte et sur la fuite dans le désert, Descriptio (...)
  • 3 Jacques Marie Lepère, “Des ville et port de Soueys, Mémoire sur la communication de la mer des Inde (...)
  • 4 André Dutertre (1753-1842), Vue de la ville et du port de Soueys, publiée dans le volume I de l’Éta (...)

1During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives of travellers to Egypt recurrently mentioned the Suez Canal project,1 which fascinated public opinions in Europe and roused the interests of political leaders. The connection between the two seas went together with the ambition to conquer Egypt, as European powers wished to improve commercial links with India. During his Egyptian campaign (1798-1801), Napoleon Bonaparte himself explored the Isthmus of Suez.2 One of the volumes of the Description de l’Egypte, which was published long after the campaign itself, maps out the vestiges of the Canal of the Pharaohs, which in Antiquity connected the Nile to the Red Sea.3 It also describes the town and port of Suez, with illustrations by André Dutertre, an artist working for the “Commission des Sciences et des Arts”,4 that completed the corpus of representations of the old city by the modern-day explorers.

  • 5 See Philippe Régnier, Les saint-simoniens en Égypte (1833-1851), Cairo, Amin Fakhry Abdelnour, 1989 (...)

2Between the return of the French from Egypt and the beginning of the construction of the Canal, even though the project continued to draw much public attention and received the support of Saint-Simonians, who explored the location in 1833,5 the history of visual representations of the isthmus went through an interesting interval. At the time of the construction of the Canal, French artists commissioned by the “Compagnie universelle du canal de Suez” were to paint images documenting the advance of progress. But while the great undertaking was still maturing and not yet under way, British travellers were the most numerous in this still marginal part of Egypt. They became the main producers of images on the eve of the extraordinary geographical transformations that were to take place in the region. This chapter examines the characteristics of these representations: were they descriptions, picturesque adventures, scientific enquiries or aesthetic experiments?

3A few examples of the work of British artist travellers show that Suez was an unusual motif in the orientalist production of the time. The diffusion of this work likely enabled the Western public to become more familiar with this little known destination on the fringes of Egypt. Besides, the fact that, as in the illustrations published in the Description de l’Égypte, Suez was represented by artists—not engineers or topographers—made it more attractive by giving it a new aesthetic veneer and picturesque quality.

  • 6 Caroline Lehni, “Lire l’Égypte en images: la représentation de l’Égypte au Royaume-Uni à travers l’ (...)
  • 7 See Lehni, Lire l’Égypte en images; “De l’illustration ethnographique à l’imagerie orientaliste: La (...)

4In the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of travel narratives on Egypt published in Britain increased thanks to a particularly conducive political and cultural context,6 marked by a surge in interest for Egyptology after the Campaign in Egypt. These narratives show the heightened appeal of the Isthmus of Suez; travel routes more frequently included a detour towards the Eastern part of the country, which revealed the diversification of travel practices and experiences. These publications increasingly featured views of the city as well as of the Desert of Suez that travellers crossed to get from Cairo to the Red Sea. The presence of this landscape among illustrations mostly characterised by an aesthetic of ruin, reflecting a taste for the picturesque and depicting the passing of time, might seem jarring. Yet it might be simply another form of aesthetic starkness; the rhetoric conveyed by these images of desolation is ultimately not that far removed from that reflected by the attraction to ancient vestiges. These images, however, are not scientific representations or scholarly illustrations designed to fulfil objectives of enriching knowledge of the area,7 as in the official missions in which a few artists were sometimes enlisted. The isthmus appeared to trigger a genuine aesthetic experience for the traveller. Perhaps the exploration of this part of Egypt gave writers an opportunity to go beyond commonplace, impersonal observations on oftvisited ruins and come face to face with modern Arab history after grappling with the original Bible story. Through the desert, the traveller was more in touch with a fearsome and fascinating nature, creating a sharp departure in tone, time and space until the release of the arrival on the shores of the Red Sea.

  • 8 William Turner, Suez, engraved plate, in Journal of a Tour in the Levant, London, John Murray, 1820 (...)

5Did the images included in these travel narratives or in the press channel a similar sense of immersive experience? They show Suez and its surroundings in a more flattering light than the descriptions they accompanied. British diplomat William Turner (1792-1867), an attaché to ambassador Robert Liston in 1811, travelled across the East for five years straight, and in the process visited the most renowned places of the Ottoman Empire and the Greek islands. The second volume of his Journal of a Tour in the Levant (1820) includes a view of Suez,8 which Turner passed through on his way to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, even though he called it indisputably the most miserable place he had seen in the Levant. Turner was not concerned with providing a highly accurate depiction of the city’s layout: the picture is very crude compared to André’s effort in the Description.

  • 9 The plates were engraved by brothers William and Edward Francis Finden, whose name featured on the (...)
  • 10 Alexandre Dumas and Adrien Dauzats, Quinze jours au Sinaï, 2 vol., Paris, Dumont, 1839.

6In the work of another William Turner, the painter of light (1775-1851), Suez was subjected to the artist’s signature dynamic treatment of sky light effects. The Red Sea at Suez was part of a 1832 commission requiring Turner to produce a series of illustrations of Biblical scenery.9 It features the same effects found in the painter’s picturesque seashore British landscapes, with their marinas and harbours under stormy skies. David Roberts (1796-1864) also enriched the corpus of the Isthmus of Suez and gave a newfound notoriety to this little known area. The Scottish painter was in Suez in 1839. In the same year, Adrien Dauzats and Alexandre Dumas published the account of a trip in 1830 in the course of which Dauzats had also been to Suez.10

  • 11 Letter to his daughter dated 27 October 1838, published in James Ballantine, The life of David Robe (...)

7David Roberts’s great trip, extending over nearly a year (1838-1839), would have a decisive influence on his work. On 24 September 1838, the painter got off in Alexandria, after a layover in Crete where Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca embarked. He went to Cairo and up the Nile, where he found himself captivated by the remnants of antiquity. In February 1839, Suez was the starting point of a second trip to the Holy Land. It inspired this meditation in Edfu: “Will this desert ever again become the busy haunt of men? Nothing is more probable, as Egypt is the medium of our direct intercourse with India”.11 Instinctively, Roberts mentioned one of the leading concerns of British imperial foreign policy. At the time, British authorities were considering opening a communication route to India through Egypt. While Roberts was in Egypt, Thomas Waghorn, a former Indian navy officer, was at work negotiating with Muhammad Ali Pasha on the creation of a railway between Cairo and Suez.

  • 12 Cairo from the Gate of Citizenib, looking towards the Desert of Suez, lithographed by Louis Haghe ( (...)
  • 13 Suez February 11th 1839, in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, p. 12.
  • 14 Letter dated 10 February 1839, published in Ballantine, The Life of David Roberts, p. 115.
  • 15 Quay at Suez February 11th 1839, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, (...)
  • 16 The Wells of Moses Wilderness of Tyh Feby 12th 1839, lithograph by Louis Haghe, The Holy Land, Syri (...)

8Upon his return, Roberts began working on the publication of a collection of 247 lithographs based on his sketches and watercolours. The Gate toward the Desert of Suez, lithographed by Louis Haghe for Egypt and Nubia12 (1848) evoked a place that was still largely unknown to the public at large, but it actually depicts Cairo and shows nothing of the desert of Suez. Roberts then produced a closer overview of Suez from the summit of Tell al-Qulzum.13 Despite its strategic role as a maritime crossroads, Suez was still a small town in the early nineteenth century. Like others before him, Roberts described the poor city and its surroundings; yet he also considered it sufficiently “picturesque” to draw a few sketches.14 His watercolour depicts a group of colourfully dressed Arab travellers in the foreground—probably members of the painter’s expedition—with Suez outlined in surprisingly white hues (for a city reputed to be miserable) in the distance. The Bedouin and their mounts and the rainbow later added to the lithograph in the background may enhance the composition, but there is no denying the concern for verisimilitude in the painter’s works and accurate surveys. Roberts, who found the plates in Description de l’Égypte “highly inaccurate,” had an exemplary approach. He was eager to go on location to correct these plates and give a greater degree of precision to his motifs. It was therefore to be expected that his views of Suez would provide a detailed depiction of the state of buildings, streets and docks, or at least describe the appearance of the city. In his compositions, the description of motifs plays an essential part, but sometimes he adopts an unusual point of view, as in the rear view of the two Colossi of Memnon, which cast immense shadows over the flooded plain. A few details are telling: some scenes depict slavery, a practice that Roberts vigorously opposed. Although he found the bazaars of Suez picturesque, he chose to paint the harbour docks (Fig. 10),15 which were sleepy during the daytime but much livelier at night when a boat arrived from Bombay. In front of understated facades, the foreground dexterously brightened up a landscape that was not as remarkable as the most beautiful ruins in the Nile Valley. Like the Wells of Moses,16 which the painter probably saw shortly after Suez, and which cannot be immediately identified, this work was more of a genre scene than a striking landscape. The name of Suez, however, appeared increasingly often in the titles of works that showed just as much care as Roberts’ most beautiful depictions of Egypt.

Figure 10: David Roberts, Quay at Suez February 11th 1839, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts…, London: F. G. Moon, 1842-1845, vol. 3, p. 11.

  • 17 William Henry Bartlett, Forty Days In The Desert, On the Track Of the Israelites: or, A Journey Fro (...)

9During his 1845 journey, the printmaker William Bartlett (1809-1854) also drew Suez from the mounds around the ancient canal; the Canal of the Pharaohs was named and depicted for the first time ever. Bartlett, who travelled extensively around the East to fulfil commissions by publishers, ended up authoring two books on the area: Forty Days in the Desert on the tracks of the Israelites in 1848 (for which he also wrote the text) and The Nile Boat in 1849.17 These two volumes were the outcomes of trips he had taken in August-September and October-December 1845.

  • 18 Engraved by J. Cousen after a drawing by William Bartlett, published in The Christian in Palestine, (...)

10His work is particularly valuable in that it shows some under-represented geographical areas that still held some mysteries. Suez from the Mounds of the Ancient Canal, engraved around 1847,18 reveals the barrenness of the place and the impressive breadth of the isthmus that would later connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. With a camel skeleton in the foreground, the desolate, inhospitable location is made even more awe-inspiring by the wide perspective adopted by the artist. A few Arab travellers and their camels breathe some life into a landscape that would otherwise seem obscure to the reader without them and the way they appear to survey the land. The presence of explorers gives importance to a place whose future was at the time under discussion. Bartlett had probably heard about the Saint-Simonians’plans to pierce the isthmus. In the context of this study, he gives us a welcome opportunity to see the location of the ancient canal represented by a topographic artist who was probably not so much interested in the fate of this marginal region of Egypt as eager to bring back original views to complete his album. Yet, the staging of this image is peculiar and differs significantly from those depicting traditional Egyptian sites; it does not readily conform to the taste for picturesque illustration that prevailed at the time. The scene cannot be easily recognised: for lovers of striking scenery, it is not as comprehensible as a clearly identified historical site or geographical view. Yet through its width of perspective the composition conveys a sense of sublime that was dear to the painter.

11In the wake of David Roberts and William Bartlett, whose views of Egypt and the East earned them a solid reputation, the landscape artist Edward Lear (1812-1888), who was also a good writer, illustrated his own travel narratives. His trips took place between 1848 and 1888. Although he seemed closer in spirit to the generations of the first half of the century, his work attests to the sweeping transformations experienced by the Eastern landscape due to the construction work on the canal in the Isthmus of Suez and around Cairo.

  • 19 Study of a Bedouin, 1849, pen and ink on paper, private collection.
  • 20 See Near Suez, evening, 15 January 1849, watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conne (...)
  • 21 Kathrin Maurer, Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in German Historicism, Berlin/Boston, (...)
  • 22 Kantara (Suez Canal), 5:25 am, 27 March 1867, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, Yale Center for Br (...)

12Lear went to Greece and Egypt in 1848 and 1849. In the vicinity of Suez, he drew sketches of Bedouins (Fig. 11)19 near the well that can be spotted on the left in Near Suez, 3pm, 4th February 1849.20 His work gave no further indication of the city’s layout, but the name of Suez became increasingly familiar. In a departure from the emptiness of the surrounding desert landscapes, he later painted The Pyramids Road, Gizeh (1873), a scene characterised by a typically Western perspective resulting from the arrangement of the acacia-bordered road built by the French in 1868 in the style of European avenues to prepare the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the subsequent social events, giving Westerners the opportunity to project themselves into an ideal East.21 This shift to more man-made landscapes echoes the transformations of Eastern nature caused by the construction of the canal, which the painter witnessed during another trip in 1867, two years before work was completed. Yet it was still as if he were a pioneer in the isthmus; the work took place in the distance as he noted the peace and quiet of a Bedouin encampment in Kantara.22

Figure 11: Edward Lear, Near Suez, Evening, 15 January 1849, watercolour with pen in brown ink over graphite on moderately thick, rough, beige wove paper, 13.3 x 23.2 cm. © Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Donald C. Gallup.

13Life in the desert was a subject of fascination for Frederick Goodall (1822-1904) and Carl Haag (1820-1915), who travelled to Suez in the winter of 1858-1859. Their outing was probably one of the last trips to the isthmus made by painters immediately prior to the vast construction undertaking.

14Goodall was aged 36 when he left for the East. He intended to do work on history paintings but lacked suitable subject matter. The only goal of his Egyptian journey was to paint Scripture-related scenes. His close friend David Roberts, who was there before him, gave him letters of introduction for his stay in Cairo. Haag was a German painter working for the Court of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He spent much of his career in Great Britain and became an undisputed master of a British technique par excellence: watercolour painting. A friend to the royal family, he went to the East in 1858, where he spent several months doing sketches and drawings in the Libyan Desert. He introduced new subjects such as the desert and Bedouin life in orientalist painting, far from the pharaonic monuments that were staples of Roberts’s work and the harems or urban scenes dear to John Frederick Lewis.

  • 23 Carl Haag, Suez 18th January 1859, watercolour and Near Suez January 1859, watercolour, private col (...)
  • 24 Carl Haag, Sand Hills on the Road to Suez 1859, watercolour and Sand Hills in the Desert, Cairo, Su (...)

15When he met up with Frederick Goodall in Cairo, his friend asked him to delay his trip to Palestine to come and live with him in the city’s Coptic district. They journeyed to Suez together from Cairo—a trip reminiscent of Gérôme and Lenoir’s expedition ten years later. On their way to the Red Sea, they were struck by the carcasses of the camels that had failed to survive the pilgrimage. These models offered them convenient opportunities to study animal anatomy. Haag did several drawings of these skeletons, notable for their painstaking accuracy rather than their macabre character.23 The images of the trip alternate between a sense of exhaustion represented by the impeccably smooth carcasses of the beasts of burden that were their main companions during these gruelling travels and emphasis on the immensity of the desert they had to cross,24 often causing the traveller to suffer a thousand small deaths.

  • 25 Frederick Goodall, The Sword of the Faithful, oil on canvas, R. A. 1884, private collection.
  • 26 Frederick Goodall, The Reminiscences of Frederick Goodall, RA, London, 1902, p. 387.
  • 27 Ibid., p. 71.

16Goodall had been enthusiastic upon his arrival in Alexandria: after his first donkey ride through town he claimed he would have enough subjects there for a lifetime of work. He was particularly impressed by the children’s school, the animated groups around the wells, the men and their water-skins, and the women filling their pitchers who reminded him of the grace of women from the ancient world—scenes similar to the genre scenes he had painted in Brittany, Normandy, Wales and Ireland. In Cairo, he sketched impressions of the city’s neighbourhoods with his silvered pencil: the aweinspiring view from the citadel, street and market scenes, the shops, the endless marriage processions. He found a similar subject in the Suez bazaar, which provides the background for one of his most famous paintings, The Sword of the Faithful,25 which depicts a Bedouin sheikh on a camel testing on his thumb the quality of a blade he is considering purchasing. Such scenes are recurring motifs of orientalist iconography (see John Frederick Lewis’s Cairo Bazaar, 1875) but here it is worth noting that the artist actually witnessed the scene. He described it in his reminiscences,26 where he explains that he sketched it on the spot. He adds that there was also a man cutting tobacco and a dealer having his accounts made up by a professional accountant in the shop next door. The Eastern backdrop is fairly commonplace (he painted a shopping alley that must have resembled many streets in which he walked during his Egyptian residence) with picturesquely dressed figures in colourful headscarves and a crowded street in which a rider on a camel slows down traffic—the same kind of spectacle that he enjoyed observing in the Coptic district of Cairo where he resided27 and where he recorded a few lively scenes for future compositions. He makes no mention of the architecture of the houses, which offer a perfect setting for the scene, bearing all the hallmarks of the Eastern street (the storefront openings, the Mashrabiyas, the arches, the refreshing shade and the minaret rising through a small patch of sky) without being evidently a portrait of the city of Suez. This is arguably a distinguishing feature of Goodall’s work: the city on the edge of Egypt no longer displays the desolate character so often bemoaned by travellers, instead offering a typical, painstakingly detailed Eastern background: the image of Suez was now more polished and more in line with the standards of the orientalist aesthetic. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884 and purchased by the banker Heriot. While it is very likely that the painter was fascinated by the scene rather than by the city of Suez itself, his work ended up being shown routinely in major exhibitions and Suez gained popularity along with it, although the name of the city was not mentioned in the painting’s title.

  • 28 Frederick Goodall, Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez, 1872, oil on canvas, Gloucestershire, Chelte (...)

17Beyond biblical geography or the mere evocation of Bedouin pilgrims waiting to embark, Goodall’s 1872 Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez (Fig. 12)28 has melancholy undertones reminiscent of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre’s The Evening/Lost Illusions (1843 Salon), inspired by a trip to Egypt in 1834. The painting seems to evoke a dream of the end of a world to which the Bedouins on the shore are bidding farewell. It works as a harbinger of the disappearance of this space with the launch of the construction work for the Canal in 1859 and the major geographical revolution that would take place in this part of Egypt, leading in particular to the creation of new cities like Ismailia and Port Said.

Figure 12: Frederick Goodall, Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez, 1872, oil on panel, 36 x 91.5 cm. © Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, Gloucestershire, UK/Bridgeman Images.

  • 29 See “Le chantier vu par les Anglais” in Hélène Braeuner, Les représentations du canal de Suez, p. 3 (...)

18The British were strongly interested in the Isthmus of Suez as a communication route to India but adamantly against the project of a North-South canal that would ultimately be completed by the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, instead preferring a railway between Cairo and the Red Sea. In the isthmus, the British were at the centre of the most violent conflicts and intimate political battles with other European powers. But that era also saw the development of a strong artistic production by British travellers who dared to venture beyond the well-trodden paths in Egypt and played an important role in enriching the iconographic documentation of the Isthmus of Suez. Arguably earlier than elsewhere, they moved beyond the prevailing taste for the picturesque and the spectacular and from the pictorial aesthetic of the Romantics, who presented the Arab world using the same stilted scenes. They showed a knack for the uncanny and the unknown, avoiding repetition and bringing a new sense of discovery. They depicted uncomfortable surroundings that required the traveller to look past appearances. This reflected a form of symbolic appropriation of an area whose geography was being redrawn in the mid nineteenth century, and the aestheticisation of the place by British painters who showed an acute interest in Eastern locales out of the beaten path. During the construction work for the Canal, the French artists commissioned by the Company had to play the promotional game that was necessary for the success of the endeavour. The 1869 opening celebrations marked the climax of the large-scale mobilisation of painters who had come to document the event. Again, among the flurry of images published in the illustrated press, the scenes depicted by the British would bear a distinctive message,29 and bring a different perspective on a controversial project.

Bibliographie

Bibliography

Primary sources

Ballantine, J., The Life of David Roberts, R.A. Compiled From his Journals and Other Sources, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, North Bridge, 1866.

Bartlett, W. H., Forty Days In The Desert, On the Track Of the Israelites: or, A Journey From Cairo, by Wady Feiran, to Mount Sinai and Petra, London, Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1848.

Bartlett, W. H., The Nile Boat, or Glimpses of the Land of Egypt, London, Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1849.

Dubois-Aymé, “Notice sur le séjour des Hébreux en Égypte et sur la fuite dans le désert”, Description de l’Égypte, Antiquités Mémoires, tome I, Paris, Imprimerie impériale 1809, pp. 291-324.

Dumas, A. and Dauzats, A., Quinze jours au Sinaï, 2 vol., Paris, Dumont, 1839.

Finden, W. and Hartwell, E. T., Landscape illustrations of the Bible, 2 vol., London, John Murray, 1836.

Goodall, F., The Reminiscences of Frederick Goodall, RA, London and Newcastle upon Tyne, Walter Scott Publishing Co. Ltd, 1902.

Jonquière (de la) C., L’expédition d’Égypte 1798-1801, état-major de l’armée, section historique, 2nd ed., Paris, Henri Charles-Lavauzelle, 1899-1907, volume III, pp. 443-98.

Lepère, J. M., “Des ville et port de Soueys, Mémoire sur la communication de la mer des Indes avec la Méditerranée, par la mer Rouge et l’isthme de Suez”, in Description de l’Égypte, État moderne, tome XI, Paris, Pancoucke, 1822, p. 37-370.

Roberts, D. and Croly, G., The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts; with historical descriptions by George Croly; lithographed by Louis Haghe, London, F.G. Moon, 1842-1845.

Stebbing, H., The Christian in Palestine, or Scenes of sacred history, historical and descriptive, London, George Virtue, 1847.

Turner, W., Journal of a Tour in the Levant, 2 vol., London, John Murray, 1820.

Secondary sources

Brégeon, J.-J., L’Égypte française au jour le jour, 1798-1801, Paris, Perrin, 1991.

Coilly, N. and Régnier P. (ed.), Le Siècle des saint-simoniens: du Nouveau Christianisme au canal de Suez, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France/Seuil, 2006.

Lehni, C., “Lire l’Égypte en images: la représentation de l’Égypte au Royaume-Uni à travers l’illustration des récits de voyage (1798-1914)”, Doctoral thesis, University Paris VII, 2007.

Lehni, C., “De l’illustration ethnographique à l’imagerie orientaliste: La représentation figurée de l’Égypte dans deux éditions du Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians de E.W. Lane (1871, 1895)”, in Liliane Kuczynski and Claudine Vassas (ed.), Perception de l’altérité culturelle et religieuse (Actes du 130e congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, La Rochelle, 2005), Paris, Éditions du CTHS, 2011, pp. 97-118 [online edition: http://cths. fr/ed/edition.php?id=5732].

Maurer, K., Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in German Historicism, Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013.

Régnier, P., Les saint-simoniens en Égypte (1833-1851), Cairo, Amin Fakhry Abdelnour, 1989.

Tromans, N. et al., The Lure of the East, British orientalist painting, 1830-1925, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 2008.

List of illustrations

Figure 10: David Roberts (1796-1864), Quay at Suez February 11th 1839, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts...; London: F.G. Moon, 1842-1845, vol. 3, p. 11.

Figure 11: Edward Lear (1812-1888), Near Suez, Evening, 15 january 1849, Watercolor with pen in brown ink over graphite on moderately thick, rough, beige wove paper, 13.3 x 23.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Donald C. Gallup, Yale BA 1934, PhD 1939.

Figure 12: Frederick Goodall (1822-1904), Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez, 1872, Oil on panel, 36 x 91.5 cm, © Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museums, Gloucestershire, UK / Bridgeman Images.

Notes

1 Hélène Braeuner, “Les représentations du canal de Suez (xve-xxe siècles): esthétiques et politiques d’une vision”, Doctoral thesis, Université de Strasbourg, 2015.

2 Du Bois-Aymé, Notice sur le séjour des Hébreux en Égypte et sur la fuite dans le désert, Description de l’Égypte, Antiquités Mémoires, tome I, Paris, Imprimerie impériale, 1809, p. 311; Clément de la Jonquière, L’expédition d’Égypte 1798-1801, état-major de l’armée, section historique, 2nd edition, Paris, Henri Charles-Lavauzelle, 1899-1907, volume III, pp. 443-98; Napoléon Ier, Correspondance. campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie, tome XXIX, Paris, 1858, cité par Jean-Joël Brégeon, L’Égypte française au jour le jour, 1798-1801, Paris, Perrin, 1991, p. 372.

3 Jacques Marie Lepère, “Des ville et port de Soueys, Mémoire sur la communication de la mer des Indes avec la Méditerranée, par la mer Rouge et l’isthme de Suez”, Description de l’Égypte, État moderne, tome XI, Paris, éditions Pancoucke, 1822, p. 173.

4 André Dutertre (1753-1842), Vue de la ville et du port de Soueys, publiée dans le volume I de l’État moderne de la Description de l’Egypte (1809-1828), planche 12.

5 See Philippe Régnier, Les saint-simoniens en Égypte (1833-1851), Cairo, Amin Fakhry Abdelnour, 1989; Nathalie Coilly and Philippe Régnier (ed.), Le Siècle des saint-simoniens: du Nouveau Christianisme au canal de Suez, Bibliothèque nationale de France/Seuil, 2006.

6 Caroline Lehni, “Lire l’Égypte en images: la représentation de l’Égypte au Royaume-Uni à travers l’illustration des récits de voyage (1798-1914)”, Doctoral thesis, Paris VII, 2007, p. 96.

7 See Lehni, Lire l’Égypte en images; “De l’illustration ethnographique à l’imagerie orientaliste: La représentation figurée de l’Égypte dans deux éditions du Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians de E. W. Lane (1871, 1895)” in Perception de l’altérité culturelle et religieuse (Actes du 130e congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, La Rochelle, 2005), ed. Liliane Kuczynski and Claudine Vassas, Paris, Éditions du CTHS, 2011, pp. 97-118.

8 William Turner, Suez, engraved plate, in Journal of a Tour in the Levant, London, John Murray, 1820, vol. 2, p. 411.

9 The plates were engraved by brothers William and Edward Francis Finden, whose name featured on the front page of the resulting publication by John Murray: Landscape illustrations of the Bible (1834-1836). Turner’s work was based on a drawing by Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson, who travelled to Suez in 1826-1827.

10 Alexandre Dumas and Adrien Dauzats, Quinze jours au Sinaï, 2 vol., Paris, Dumont, 1839.

11 Letter to his daughter dated 27 October 1838, published in James Ballantine, The life of David Roberts, R.A. Compiled From his Journals and Other Sources, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, North Bridge, 1866, pp. 91-2.

12 Cairo from the Gate of Citizenib, looking towards the Desert of Suez, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts...; lithographed by Louis Haghe, London, F. G. Moon, 1842-1845, vol. 3, p. 26.

13 Suez February 11th 1839, in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, p. 12.

14 Letter dated 10 February 1839, published in Ballantine, The Life of David Roberts, p. 115.

15 Quay at Suez February 11th 1839, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, vol. 3, p. 11.

16 The Wells of Moses Wilderness of Tyh Feby 12th 1839, lithograph by Louis Haghe, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, p. 9.

17 William Henry Bartlett, Forty Days In The Desert, On the Track Of the Israelites: or, A Journey From Cairo, by Wady Feiran, to Mount Sinai and Petra, London, Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1848; The Nile Boat, or Glimpses of the Land of Egypt, London, Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1849.

18 Engraved by J. Cousen after a drawing by William Bartlett, published in The Christian in Palestine, or Scenes of sacred history, historical and descriptive, Henry Stebbing, London, George Virtue, 1847.

19 Study of a Bedouin, 1849, pen and ink on paper, private collection.

20 See Near Suez, evening, 15 January 1849, watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, published in Nicholas Tromans, The Lure of the East, British orientalist painting, 1830-1925, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2008, pp. 16-7. In the same collection: Outside The Walls of Suez, 8 30 A. m., 17 January 1849, watercolour, pen and ink on paper. Also notable is Beer Suez/16 Jan. 1849, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, private collection and Outside The Walls of Suez, 8 30 A.m., 17 January 1849, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, private collection.

21 Kathrin Maurer, Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in German Historicism, Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013, p. 49.

22 Kantara (Suez Canal), 5:25 am, 27 March 1867, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

23 Carl Haag, Suez 18th January 1859, watercolour and Near Suez January 1859, watercolour, private collection.

24 Carl Haag, Sand Hills on the Road to Suez 1859, watercolour and Sand Hills in the Desert, Cairo, Suez, 1859, watercolour, private collection.

25 Frederick Goodall, The Sword of the Faithful, oil on canvas, R. A. 1884, private collection.

26 Frederick Goodall, The Reminiscences of Frederick Goodall, RA, London, 1902, p. 387.

27 Ibid., p. 71.

28 Frederick Goodall, Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez, 1872, oil on canvas, Gloucestershire, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museums.

29 See “Le chantier vu par les Anglais” in Hélène Braeuner, Les représentations du canal de Suez, p. 309.

Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 10: David Roberts, Quay at Suez February 11th 1839, lithographed by Louis Haghe (1806-1885), in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts…, London: F. G. Moon, 1842-1845, vol. 3, p. 11.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6053/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 436k
Légende Figure 11: Edward Lear, Near Suez, Evening, 15 January 1849, watercolour with pen in brown ink over graphite on moderately thick, rough, beige wove paper, 13.3 x 23.2 cm. © Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Donald C. Gallup.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6053/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 420k
Légende Figure 12: Frederick Goodall, Waiting for the Boat, Gulf of Suez, 1872, oil on panel, 36 x 91.5 cm. © Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, Gloucestershire, UK/Bridgeman Images.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6053/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 353k

Auteur

Doctor in art history. Her research centres on the analysis of images and discourses related to Orientalist art, following on her PhD thesis on “The representations of the Suez Canal (15th-20th century): aesthetics and politics of a vision” (University of Strasbourg, 2015). Among other titles, she is the author of several studies on nineteenth-century artists (Les peintres de la Baie de Somme, autour de l’Impressionnisme, 2001; Victor Hugo, récits et dessins de voyages, 2001; Les peintres de l’Alsace, 2003), which were published by La Renaissance du Livre. On Orientalist painting, she is the author of “Séailles biographe: Dehodencq ou le martyr de l’art”, in Gabriel Séailles, Anthologie critique (Paris, Kimé, 2010).

Jean-Yves Bart (Traducteur)

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