ANN ARBOR—Touring Egypt and the Near East in the 19th century was common, but the drawings, sketches and resulting lithographs David Roberts produced during his tour of North Africa and the Near East in 1838-39 were anything but common. Ten of those lithographs, eight of them images of Egypt, are on display at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology throughout the summer.

While many travelers had traced this path before and in less comfortable and more dangerous conditions, Roberts was the first professional artist to embark on the journey with the express intention of making sketches and drawing that would be reworked later into pictures for sale. His output was prodigious: 272 sketches, a panorama of modern Cairo, and three full sketchbooks.

Exhibiting artistic talent at a young age and imitating and copying any picture or engraving he could get his hands on, this son of a Scottish shoemaker left school at 11 and apprenticed to an Edinburgh house painter, a position he held for seven years, honing his skills while producing imitative painting by transforming flat walls into marble staircases, elegant pavements, and traceried panels for wealthy clients. Another 14 years as a scenic painter in the theater, first with a strolling company, and then with minor provincial companies, finally brought him fame and critical acclaim for his work with theatrical groups on the London stage.

Following the custom of sketching tours abroad, Roberts made several trips to Spain, but finally realized a childhood dream when he ventured to the Holy Land and Egypt. A compulsive writer of journals and letters, Roberts, though widely read, was a notoriously poor speller as indicated in this excerpt from a letter recounting his Nile voyage:

“…and with the exception of Mosquitos, myriads of flys, fleas, bugs, lice, lizards, and ratts, I was tollerably well off–with these accompaniments you may be shure all was not pleasure–add to which the Thermometre at 100 in the Shade and sometimes higher…But that is of no consequence…I cannot say [that my sketches have] done justice to ‘ancient Egypt’, for no painting can do that…and no artist that ever lived could come near – the sunrising and setting are the most glorious, perhaps in the world and these glorious ruins, ruins still retaining the brillant colours with which they were decorated…”

For 10 years after his return to England in 1839, Roberts produced drawings based on his sketches for a series of 247 lithographs. The Egyptian collection, first published between 1846 and 1850 in large format and variously colored, appeared in a reduced size series in monochrome between 1855 and 1856. “A Victorian’s Passion for Egypt and the Near East: David Roberts 1796-1864” will join the Kelsey’s permanent collection of Greek and Roman art and artifacts and its exhibition on mummification, “Death in Ancient Egypt: Preserving Eternity” for the summer. The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology is open Tuesday-Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 1-4 p.m. Admission is free.