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| David Roberts |
| 1796-1864 |
| European Artist |
| David Roberts was born is Scotland in 1796. After moving to London, he achieved a respectable reputation as an artist prior to 1838 when he traveled to Egypt and the Holy Land to paint the monuments, architecture and people. David Roberts was 42 when he set off, in 1838, on the second of his important foreign journeys. The first, in 1832-33, was to Spain, a country then little known to his compatriots. From Gilbraltar he made a short trip to Morocco, to Tangiers and Tetuan, his first African experience. In the five years between the two journeys, Roberts earned enough from sales and oils and watercolors, and from commissions for book illustrations, to undertake this second expensive expedition. Like most of the artists making the same trip, he did most of his drawing on the way downriver. The material collected by Roberts over his travels was to serve him for many more years. The main short-term result was the six volumes of lithographs for which he is best known. The volumes were described as "the most ambitious work ever published in England with lithographed plates." They were issued to subscribers in monthly installments over a number of years. He continued to paint until his sudden death in 1864 when he was in the middle of a popular series of London subjects, left unfinished. For a poor shoemaker's son, who left school at 12 or 13, had no formal art training at all, but learned his craft as a house painter, then as a scene painter, his was a great achievement. |
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