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Robert's identity quickly became bound up with his depictions of the exotic East. When Robert Scott Lauder (1803-1869) painted his portrait in 1840, he chose to depict Roberts in the Arab dress he had acquired on his travels to facilitate safe passage through Egypt and the Holy Land in preparation for making chromolithographs produced in a six-volume set between 1842 and 1849, titled The Holy Land, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia. The watercolor The Great Temple of Amon Karnak, the Hypostyle Hall was made for the fourth volume, devoted to Egyptian remains, and was based on the sketches he had made while traveling through the region in late 1838. At that time, the history of Egypt was still myserious and in the process of being unraveled. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French sikduiers in 1799 opened up the possibility of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time, a task accomplished in 1822. In the meantime, the uninitiated looked upon the ruins with perplexity. As Roscoe put it, "The remains of Egyptian magnitude bewilder the mind with doubt and strange inquiry."

Roberts set out to illustrate the principal sites in Egypt, and this view, dated November 27, 1838, depicts the vast Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, built by Sety I and Ramases II, which was already a famous ruin by the time Roberts sketched it. "What shall I say about Carnac?" he wondered in a letter home: "Its grandeur cannot be imagined, were I to write what I think it would be merely rhapsody." His stage background suggested one possible solution. While the viewer is initially seduced by Robert's evocation of a calm oasis in the foreground shade, the eye is quickly drawn to the dramatic coup de théâtre in the background, where the serenity is shattered by the sudden appearance of a giant column slanting at a precipitous angle. Roberts frequently exaggerated the scale of the Egyptian ruins by depicting the human figures artificially small, in this case suggesting the fearsome immensity of the ancient temple by playing the unstable masonry off against the seemingly insignificant modern Egyptians who shelter within it. The fallen columns not only hints at the decline of modern Egypt, but it also suggests a moral lesson on the transience of earthly glory for imperial Britain, just as Shelley's celebrated poem "Ozymandias" (1818) pointed to the absurdity of the worldy pretensions of Karnak's builder, Ramases II.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 166, 72