THE HOLY LAND, SYRIA, IDUMEA, ARABIA, EGYPT & NUBIA. / AFTER LITHOGRAPHS BY LOUIS HAGHE FROM DRAWINGS MADE ON THE SPOT

London: Day & Son, 1855. First Quarto Edition. Hardcover. Some foxing, heaviest on the titles and initial leaves, occasionally to the margins of the plates but rarely affecting the images. Public library bookplate with small ink stamps at various places throughout, sometimes in the margins of the plates but never on the images. Hinges repaired with new paste-downs, general scuffing and wear along spine edges but bindings still tight. Very Good. With Historical Descriptions by The Revd. George Croly. Six quarto (8-1/4" x 12") volumes bound in three in later half red morocco leather with matching corners and gilt-lettered and decorated spines. Complete with 250 tinted lithographs including the frontispiece portrait of David Roberts in the first volume, a frontispiece of the temple at Abu Simbel and the map of his tour in the second, as well as all 6 lithographed title pages and print lists at the opening of each volume. In 1838 Roberts traveled to Egypt, which had grown popular both as a travel destination for the adventurous antiquarian, and as the subject of highly valued artworks. The journey became an extensive tour of the region, including Jerusalem, Petra (in modern Jordan), Giza, Thebes and various sites along the Nile. During this trip, he constantly sketched stunning views of colossal ruins, ancient temples of the Egyptian and Persian empires, and particularly biblical sites in and around Jerusalem. His sketches also depicted the local customs, clothes and contemporary dwellings, markets and palaces, and the third published volume (the first half of the second volume in this set) includes a scene depicting his meeting with Muhammad Ali Pasha in Alexandria, which he did not sketch at the time but is reputed to have produced from memory. Upon his return to Britain, after he was fêted by high society in Scotland, he worked with the engraver Louis Haghe to produce the collection in book form, funded by subscriber which he personally solicited. Thanks to the popularity of the subject matter, and the relative absence of British art on the same subject, he was quite successful, with Queen Victoria as subscriber number one (her large paper folio copy is still in the Royal Collection.) Louis Haghe, along with William Day, was a Lithographer to the Queen and innovator in the process of colour lithography, and the lithographs in this volume benefit from his skill.