Mosque of Sultan El Goorah

In 1838–39, David Roberts spent eleven months traveling in Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Land. He was gathering visual material for lithographs and finished pictures he would later exhibit in London. In Cairo, he was permitted to work inside the city’s mosques, becoming one of the first British artists to do so. The artist often distorts architectural scale in his images, exaggerating height or reducing the size of figures for greater emotional impact. Here, he emphasizes the size of the sixteenth-century al-Ghûri mosque by selecting a viewpoint that hovers above the floor, lending the building a sense of grandeur (2022).