The abandoned historic rock-bound city of Petra, famous capital of the Nabataean Arabs, was known through ancient texts yet remained unexplored by westerners until 1812. The topographical artist and writer Edward Lear traveled there, and this view of the amphitheater was made under adverse circumstances, as Lear recorded in his journal. He reached Petra on April 13, 1858 after a six-day camel journey and was “more delighted and astonished than I had ever been by any spectacle.”
Lear immediately set about making drawings of the site, doing so “uninterruptedly until it became too dark to see the marks of my pencil.” Overnight a group of 100 people from various local tribes gathered around his camp, demanding payment for trespassing on their land (though Lear felt he had already paid in advance for his transit). Deciding that he could not negotiate with such a group, he gave orders in the morning for the tents to be taken down in preparation for leaving and slipped away to make “a last drawing at the theatre,” this sheet, inscribed 14 April, 7.30am.
As Lear described it: “I had not long to devote to my drawing from the upper part of the theatre; yet how vivid and enduring are the memories of that half-hour! The pile of vast rocks before me was dark purple and awful in the shadows of the morning, and the perpendicular walls of the wild rent of the Sik [sic] were indescribably grand, closed almost at their roots, but reflecting bright sky and white clouds in the stream which burst through them among thickets of oleander and broom and rushed onward below the semicircle of the ancient theatre cut in the living rock below me.”
Lear’s choice of blue paper probably reflects the cool early morning light and purplish rock colors he sought. His many pencil color notes on the sheet result from his habit of sketching the scene quickly in pencil and then adding the watercolor later in the studio. In 1859 he made an oil of the theatre at Petra based on this watercolor.
Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.
