Henry Roderick Newman
Abu Simbel, 1904
Watercolour on paper
64.3 x 41.3cm
13021
Copyright The Artist
£ 26,000
Henry Roderick Newman (1843–1917, Easton, New York) was an American painter and watercolourist closely associated with the principles of John Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. Originally trained in medicine,...
Henry Roderick Newman (1843–1917, Easton, New York) was an American painter and watercolourist closely associated with the principles of John Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. Originally trained in medicine, he turned to painting in the early 1860s and later studied in France under Jean-Léon Gérôme before settling in Italy. From 1887 onwards, Newman travelled repeatedly to Egypt, where the ancient monuments of the Nile became one of his principal subjects. His watercolours are distinguished by a meticulous observation of architecture, surface and light, reflecting the Ruskinian ideal of fidelity to nature.Dated 1904,Abu Simbel depicts the interior of the Great Temple of Ramesses II from an unusual viewpoint deep within its hypostyle hall. The monumental Osiride figures recede towards the open doorway, where the intense Egyptian light reveals a distant glimpse of the Nile. Rather than approaching the temple as a picturesque archaeological monument, Newman carefully records its carved stone, surviving ceiling decoration and shifting illumination. The composition reverses the viewpoint adopted by David Roberts in his celebrated nineteenth-century representation of the same interior: Newman looks outward from the temple towards the landscape rather than inward from its entrance. The work belongs to a sustained body of Egyptian watercolours produced through Newman's repeated visits to Abu Simbel and Philae over nearly two decades.
