David Roberts: Artist and Traveler

by John Olbrantz

David Roberts (1796–1864) was a self-taught Scottish painter who rose from the depths of poverty and obscurity in Edinburgh to become one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, a member of the Royal Academy, and a painter whose works can be found in some of the most distinguished public and private collections in Europe and America. A highly ambitious and motivated artist who loved to travel, he is best known for the travelogue of Egypt and the Holy Land that he produced with lithographer Louis Haghe from sketches he made during a nine-month trip to the region in 1838–39. These exquisitely rendered prints of the architecture and topography of the Middle East, as well as the prints of Moorish Spain that he made on a trip there a decade earlier, firmly established him as an important Orientalist painter and the most accomplished architectural and topographical painter of his day. David Artist and Traveler features a lively text by art historian and Hallie Ford Museum of Art director John Olbrantz, informative endnotes to the author’s essay, a brief chronology of Roberts’s career, a selected bibliography for further reading, and 96 color illustrations.

152 pages, Hardcover

Published January 15, 2023