Edinburgh-born David Roberts was the first professional artist to visit the Middle East without a patron or connection to a military expedition. He sailed to Alexandria in Egypt in 1838 and travelled up the Nile, through Cairo and Luxor to Abu Simbel, and on to Israel, arriving in Jerusalem at Easter in 1839, before travelling north through Lebanon and departing from Beirut. He filled three sketchbooks and made 272 watercolours of temples, ruins, people and landscapes. It was these that provided the basis for the 247 lithographs by Louis Haghe (1806-85), published in three volumes between 1842 and 1849. Haghe, the leading lithographer of the time, specialized in hand-tinted lithographs, and the range of colours and tonality used in these volumes give a sense of the delicacy and spontaneous quality of Roberts’s original drawings.