Ramla, Ancient Arimathea

David Roberts visited Ramla on 27th March 1839 on his way from Jaffa to Jerusalem. In his Journal, he enthused about the landscape through which he travelled, describing it as ‘a richly cultivated country’, continuing, ‘Since childhood I have not felt such a perfect enjoyment of the beauties of nature…’ (this and the following citations are from Roberts’s MS Eastern Journal, National Library of Scotland (Acc.7723/2). Arriving at the town, then believed to be the birthplace of Joseph of Arimathea, Roberts and his companions enjoyed the hospitality of the Spanish monks from the Franciscan Monastery; their Father Superior accompanied him on a tour of the ancient monuments. They visited ‘several large cisterns’, now known to be part of an underground, 8th-century reservoir, and ‘the tower and walls of an ancient mosque which our worthy guide would persist in calling a Christian church; it may perhaps have at one time been used as such but there can be no doubt as to the architecture being Saracenic’. This structure, prominent in the middle ground of Roberts’s view, is the Tower of Ramla (or White Tower), built in the early 14th century as the minaret of the earlier 8th-century White Mosque (al-Masjid al-Abyad), more of which clearly survived in Roberts’s time than now. Roberts was also shown some ‘subteranious chambers’ there, which he rightly surmised to have been further cisterns. In the town itself, Roberts, with Jens Pell and Hanafi Ismael, an Egyptian who had accompanied them on their journey from Cairo, visited the Great Mosque, originally a Crusader building, believed by Roberts to have been the Church of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. It seems that Roberts was no longer wearing the Turkish dress that he had donned in order to visit the interiors of the mosques in Cairo, but Pell, who was, entered and reported that the building was ‘divided into a nave and aisles on each side, with clustered columns’ .

In this beautifully modulated and atmospheric watercolour, Roberts views the town of Ramla from a distance, as he approached it from the West. It is one of the series of 272 that he made during his momentous journey through Egypt and what was then known as the Holy Land, between September 1838 and May 1839, a journey that his friend and biographer, James Ballantine, later described as the ‘great central episode of his artistic life; it was the fulfilment of the dream of his life from boyhood’. During the decade after his return to England, he made a completely new set of watercolours for the series of lithographs, executed by Louis Haghe, that were eventually published together as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, between 1842 and 1849. The later watercolour for this view is not known to have survived, but in the lithograph, the understated watery foreground of Roberts’s preliminary watercolour has been augmented by broken columns and carved stones, with a group of Arab figures, resulting in a more defined but much less evocative composition.

We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.