David Roberts, R. A..

Born Stockbridge, nr Edinburgh, 24 Oct 1796; died London, 25 Nov 1864.

Scottish painter. The son of a shoemaker, he was apprenticed to a house-painter. From 1816 until 1830 he was employed in the theatre to design and paint stage scenery, first in Edinburgh and Glasgow and after 1822 in London. While in Scotland he met and worked with Clarkson Stanfield and later collaborated with him in London on dioramas and panoramas. Among Roberts’s commissions from Covent Garden were the sets for the first London performance of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail in 1827.

Roberts exhibited his first easel painting in London in 1824 and at the Royal Academy in 1826 (View of Rouen Cathedral, no. 221; untraced). Four years later his success enabled him to give up theatrical work. Thereafter, in common with other contemporary painters of picturesque topography and architecture, such as Stanfield, J. D. Harding and James Holland, Roberts undertook journeys abroad in search of exotic or impressive subjects. He made his first visit to Spain in 1832–3, one of the first British artists to travel there. On his return, his reputation was enhanced by oil paintings such as Fortress of the Alhambra (1836; Cambridge, MA, Fogg) for John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick, and by the publication of his watercolours as engravings in Landscape Annuals (1835–8) and as lithographs in his own Picturesque Sketches in Spain (1837).

From Spain, Roberts briefly visited Morocco; later he made watercolours from sketches by other artists for engraving in T. H. Horne’s Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1836). These encounters with the oriental world, in the context of contemporary interest in exotic places, especially the lands of the Bible, encouraged him to undertake a tour of the Near East in 1838. He was one of the first independent and professional British artists to experience the Orient at first hand. His visit coincided with William Müller’s, though neither artist seems to have been aware of the other’s presence; David Wilkie and J. F. Lewis followed in the early 1840s. Roberts arrived in Jerusalem at Easter 1839, having travelled from Egypt via Sinai and Petra; later he continued north to Lebanon and departed from Beirut in May. His drawings show his ability to create visually effective compositions from a variety of subjects. His experience as a scene-painter helped him to convey the vast proportions of the Egyptian temples and the vistas of towns, deserts and mountains. He also depicted more detailed interiors of buildings and scenes of local life.

Roberts’s eastern compositions reached a wide audience through 247 lithographs made by Louis Haghe. Originally published in parts, these were later bound into six volumes as The Holy Land, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–9; for illustrations see Philae and [not available online]). Roberts also exhibited and sold dramatic oil paintings of Eastern subjects, such as A Recollection of the Desert on the Approach of the Simoon (1850; priv. col., see 1981 exh. cat., p. 26), painted for Charles Dickens. He achieved his effects through an ingenious choice of viewpoint (which sometimes disregarded topographical accuracy), a balance of light and dark, and the use of strong and vibrant colour. He was elected ARA in 1838 and RA in 1841.

The East was Roberts’s greatest source of inspiration, but he also made frequent trips to the Continent from 1824. He went to Belgium and France several times and also visited the Netherlands and the Rhine. In 1851 he travelled to northern Italy and Austria; he saw Rome for the first time in 1853–4. Almost every year he spent some time in his native Scotland and in the 1860s he began a series of views of the Thames.

Roberts’s prime concern in his oil and watercolour paintings was, as John Ruskin noted, the depiction not of fleeting atmospheric effects but of the ‘constant aspect of any place’. Another eminent acquaintance, William Thackeray, summarized his achievement: ‘he has sketched the spires of Antwerp, the peaks of Lebanon, the rocks of Calton Hill, the towers and castles that rise by the Rhine; the airy Cairo minarets, the solemn Pyramids and vast Theban columns, and the huts under the date-trees along the banks of the Nile’ (W. M. Thackeray: Critical Papers on Art, London, 1904, p. 272; 1st edn 1850).

The contents of Roberts’s studio were auctioned at Christie’s, London, on 13 and 15–19 May 1865.

Briony Llewellyn. "Roberts, David." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T072403 (accessed May 2, 2012).