Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) came from humble stock outside of Edinburgh. The son of a shoemaker, he was apprenticed at the age of ten to a house painter and decorator for seven years, acquiring skills as a decorative painter. In 1816, Roberts took a job painting scenery and began his career as a designer and painter of stage sets.
During his apprenticeship, Roberts had studied art in the evenings, and in 1821 he began to produce oil paintings seriously, developing an interest in landscape and cityscape views. Roberts continued in his career as a stage designer while at the same time pursuing his fine art and building a reputation as an academic painter. The subjects of his early work from the 1820’s are English and Scottish scenes, but he began to paint other subjects around 1830, including prominent buildings and views in France and the Low Countries. In 1832, Roberts traveled to Spain, returning to England with a large collection of sketches that he turned into a series of oil paintings.
Roberts’ voyage to Egypt, Nubia, the Sinai, the Holy Land and Lebanon produced his best-known work, portfolios of lithographs produced after sketches made on this trip from 1838 to 1840. Egypt and Nubia and Sketches in the Holy Land and Syria were monumental works at the time, quickly selling to subscribers, the first of whom was Queen Victoria. Six lithographs from the Egypt and Nubia portfolio were sold in our September 27, 2014 auction, lot 63 (pictured at left), for a hammer price of $5,500.
Following the success of his Orientalist work, Roberts traveled to Italy where he painted views in Venice and in Rome. Venice Canal, from 1847, is a very fine example of Roberts’ ability to capture the movement and play of light off the water and the buildings that surround Venice’s storied canals. The composition is typical of his views of Venice, with a low horizon line and a large area of cloudy sky. Venice itself was an apt subject for Roberts, lending itself well to the eye of a former theater set designer. For a work on paper, Venice Canal is quite large, allowing for the ability to see the smallest details in a larger format and to appreciate the fine use of color and brushstroke. Roberts’ paintings of Venice are closer in style to English Romanticism than the work he did in Egypt and the Middle East, though their connection to his Orientalist works and his background in set design are both very apparent.
We are pleased to have on offer in our March 14-15th auction, Lot 125, David Roberts’ Venice Canal, with an estimate of $4,000 to $8,000.