The Pyramids of Sakkarah, North East

Details

FRANCIS FRITH (1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Sakkarah, North East
albumen print mounted on card
signed and dated in the negative (image); typed title (mount, recto)
Image/sheet: 38 x 49.2 cm. (15 x 19 ½ in.)
Mount: 53.2 x 65 cm (21 x 25 ½ in.)
1858

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Christie's, South Kensington, London, 9 November 1989, lot 629.
Acquired by Charles Isaacs Photographs, from the above.
Acquired by Quillan Company from the above, 1990.
Their sale; Sotheby's, New York, 7 April 2008, lot 60.
Lee Gallery, Winchester, USA, from whom purchased by Philip Hewat-Jaboor in May 2012.

Literature

H. Gernsheim, Incunabula of British Photographic Literature 1839-1875, London, 1984, p. 31, no. 130.
Jill Qasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs, New York, 1991, pl. 20.

Exhibited

Probably Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 19th-Century Views of Egypt, May - September 1992, catalogue not traced.

Conditions of sale

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Benedict Winter Associate Director, Specialist

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Lot Essay

Francis Frith was struck with wanderlust at an early age. Discontented with his job in Liverpool and inspired by the pyramids, he made his first trip to Egypt in 1856, landing in Alexandria in September of that year, travelling up the Nile through Egypt to Syria and Palestine. There he concentrated on capturing the monuments of the 'romantic past'. This photograph is from his second trip and shows the oldest of Egypt's pyramids, the 3rd Dynasty Step-Pyramid of Pharoah Djoser.

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