
The Temple at Dendur, Nubia
David Roberts
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Roberts traveled up the Nile in 1838 and reached Abu Simbel in Nubia on November 8. One of the local monuments he sketched during three days in the area was the small Roman era temple at Dendur. After returning to London in 1839, the artist created detailed watercolors that Louis Haghe used to create lithographs. Eighty-five Egyptian subjects, published 1848–49, included "The Temple of Dandour, Nubia." Roberts’s images shaped how Europeans saw the region and his choice of this subject may even have influenced the actual temple’s preservation in the 1960s—before the site was flooded by the High Aswan Dam, the structure was dismantled and presented to the United States by the government of Egypt. Today, the Temple of Dendur (68.154) is one of the Museum’s great treasures.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.