The Holy Land : Yesterday and Today

David Roberts was one of the most highly acclaimed landscape artists of the 19th century. In 1839 he undertook a journey across the Sinai Peninsula to Petra, Jerusalem and Palestine, along the Lebanese coast and to the mysterious city of Baalbek. The lithographs based on the sketches Roberts executed during his remarkable exploration of the Holy Land won him fame that still endures today. This oversized, full-color volume presents, for the first time, Roberts' original plates, arranged in chronological order, with commentary and extracts from his journals. Each illustration is paired with a photograph that depicts the same composition and setting, nearly 150 years later, offering an imaginative and evocative form of time travel, a search of new - yet ancient - discoveries in one of the world's most historic and most fascinating regions.