Feature image: David Roberts in collaboration with Louis Haghe, Bethlehem, April 5, 1839 (in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, vol. 2), 1842‒49, hand-colored lithograph, 16” x 24 ⅛” inches, Image courtesy of the collection of Ken and Linda Sheppard, Photograph by Dale Peterson.
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Manitowoc, WI – Step back in time to experience Middle East travel in the 1800s with Antiquity Unveiled: David Roberts’ Artistic Expedition 1838-1839 at the Rahr-West Art Museum. This exhibit will open on Sunday, April 12, and will be in place until Sunday, August 2, 2026.
David Roberts (Scottish, 1796-1864) was a self-taught painter who rose from the depths of poverty and obscurity in Edinburgh, Scotland to become one of the most celebrated artists and travelers of his generation, a member of the Royal Academy, and an artist whose work can be found in some of the most distinguished public and private collections in Europe and America. A highly ambitious and motivated artist who loved to travel, he is best known for The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, a travelogue illustrated with 247 hand-colored and tinted lithographs of Egypt and the Holy Land that he produced with lithographer Louis Haghe from sketches he made during a nine-month trip to the region in 1838-39.
A major exhibition of Roberts’s prints, Antiquity Unveiled: David Roberts’ Artistic Expedition 1838 – 1839, opens April 12 continues through August 2, 2026, at the Rahr-West Art Museum. Roberts’s exquisitely rendered prints of the architecture and topography of the Middle East, as well as the prints of Moorish Spain that he made on a trip there a decade earlier, firmly established him as an important Orientalist painter and the most accomplished architectural and topographical painter of his day. In addition to appealing to the growing European and American appetite for travel to exotic places, as well as the need to add veracity to the Bible which was coming under increased scrutiny at the time, Roberts’s prints would have a profound impact on the emerging fields of Egyptology and biblical archaeology.
1839 (The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, vol. 6), 1842‒49, hand-colored lithograph, 17 ⅜” x 24”, Image courtesy of the collection of Ken and Linda Sheppard, Photograph by Dale Peterson.
Charles C. West and his family traveled this region between 1912 and 1940. We will be displaying some of the family’s scrapbooks that correlate with the David Roberts’ exhibit in the Vilas-Rahr Mansion. The Wests would have loved this and you will, too!
Organized by John Olbrantz, the Maribeth Collins Director of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, Antiquities Unveiled features 58 prints and 4 title vignettes of Spain, Egypt, Nubia, and the Holy Land on loan from Ken and Linda Sheppard. In addition to the prints on display, the exhibition is accompanied by text panels, maps, photo murals, and annotated labels with excerpts from Roberts’s Eastern Journal.
This tour of the exhibit is circulated by International Art and Artists, Washington, DC, a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions, and the public.
Local sponsorship of the exhibition comes from Salutz Law, Kaysun Corporation, Schwartz Manufacturing and private donations.
The Rahr-West Art Museum is admission-free. Find hours and visitor information at rahrwestartmuseum.org. The Rahr-West Art Museum is a department of the City of Manitowoc.
For More information
Diana Bolander, Curator/Assistant Director, 920-686-3092, dbolander@manitowoc.org