1838
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Egypt and Nubia, Volume III, No. 26, Cairo, Looking West is a 1838 by Louis Haghe, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This print shows Cairo’s skyline in the 1830s—minarets, domes, and palm trees stretching under a hazy sky. Boats float on the Nile in the foreground. It’s one page from a travel book by David Roberts, who sketched the scene on the spot. Louis Haghe then turned those sketches into prints so people back in Europe could see the Middle East without leaving home. The book came out just as Britain was expanding its empire in the region. Look up the technique called lithography to see how artists made prints like this.
This printed leaf depicts a panoramic scene of Cairo around the 1800s, viewed from the west. David Roberts was among the earliest British artists to travel to the Middle East in 1838–39, a trip that resulted in more than 250 drawings depicting Egypt and the Holy Land. He later worked with printer Louis Haghe to translate these works into lithography in order to reach a wider audience at a time that coincided with the expansion of European colonialism.
The Cairo skyline is pierced by minarets, the slender mosque towers from which the Muslim faithful would be called to prayer.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis Haghe (17 March 1806 – 9 March 1885) was a lithographer and watercolourist from the Netherlands and then the United Kingdom.
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