The illustrations featured in Herod are taken from The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, a travelogue of 19th-century Palestine and Middle East and the magnum opus of Scottish painter David Roberts. The book contains 250 lithographs by Louis Haghe of Roberts's watercolor sketches. It was first published by subscription between 1842 and 1849, in two separate publications: The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea and Arabia and Egypt and Nubia. William Brockedon and George Croly wrote much of the text, Croly writing the historical, and Brockedon the descriptive portions.
The book has been escribed as "one of the art-publishing sensations of the mid-Victorian period. It exceeded all other earlier lithographic projects in scale, and was one of the most expensive publications of the nineteenth century and it has "proved to be the most pervasive and enduring of the nineteenth-century renderings of the East circulated in the West.” Prints from the series continue to be sought after and command very high prices--high three to low four-digits: a very high price for a nineteenth century print.
The print below is the Oasis of Ein Gedi, near Qumran, on the Dead Sea.
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