1848
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Egypt and Nubia, Volume III, No. 26, Cairo, Looking West is a 1848 by Louis Haghe, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This is a printed view of Cairo from the 1840s, packed with minarets, domes, and tiny figures going about their day. The city stretches out under a pale sky, almost like a postcard. It’s not a painting—it’s a lithograph, a kind of print made from a drawing on stone. The artist, David Roberts, traveled to Egypt and sketched what he saw. Then Louis Haghe turned those sketches into prints so more people could see them back in Europe. Look up the technique of lithography to see how ink sticks to stone.
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 to reach a wider audience at a time of expanding 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.
See the richer artist page
![Egypt and Nubia, Volume III: Tombs of the Caliphs-Cairo. Mosque of Ayed Be[y]](https://pub-3a17a9933ad74fb28aa30fa758592f23.r2.dev/artworks/9062e89e981f8684/thumb.webp)
