Bab al-Wazir street, Cairo

Artist: Probably James Robertson (1813–1888)
Technique: Salted paper print with watercolour and gouache
Date: c. 1857
Dimensions: 383 × 410 mm (framed)

This is a 19th century original, not a digitally printed copy. Bought in the United Kingdom. Framed in Cape Town.

Almost resembling a family group shot, this delightful picture combines a low-contrast, photo-realistic depiction of a street in Cairo with more brightly painted “staffage” – the anonymous little figures landscape painters and others sometimes add for scale and interest. 

This is not, though, a painting in the traditional sense: it’s a photographic print on paper overpainted with watercolour and gouache. The Scottish engraver and photographer James Robertson produced work like this in the 1850s, mostly in Constantinople, but he travelled widely and visited Cairo – and this street – in 1857 with his brother-in-law and fellow photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909).

Bab al-Wazir was one of the gates of Cairo’s Old City. Completed in 1341, it was sadly demolished in 2013. The banded buildings in the picture still stand, however, being the funerary mosque and madrasa of the mamluk Aytmish al-Bajasi, from 1383.