An Egyptian Girl with a Sistrum

Long set out on a lengthy trip to Egypt and Syria in 1874, which, combined with visits to the British Museum in London, gave him with the subjects that helped him become Britain’s most expensive living artist in the early 1880s. Spielman and Ruskin, two renowned art critics, approved his work, and he was recognised as having achieved a harmonic union of art and archaeology. In the first part of the nineteenth century, archaeological expeditions to the Middle East were quickly assembled in a kind of gold rush of discovery. Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist, was one of the first to realise that ancient stories like Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid reflected actual historical events, and that these ancient stories came to life as buried cities reappeared one after another beneath layers of later civilisations and sand. In the 1940s and 1950s, British archaeologists such as Charles Fellows from Asia Minor (1840), Charles Newton from Halikarnassos (1857), and AH Layard from the Assyrian sites of old Nimrod and Nineveh returned their discoveries to the rapidly increasing British Museum. The Rosetta Stone has finally supplied the key to the elusive third language, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, inscribed with the identical message in two known languages (Demotic and Ancient Greek), opening up an exciting new realm of interpretation.

Pre- and post-photographic days, artists travelled alongside the expeditions to document the excavations. Later, as tourists arrived, painters imagined life in the ruins and completed their dreams in their studios in London for the Royal Academy. They were territorial in their topics, specialising in specific civilisations – Long had a monopoly on Babylon, yet in his paintings he frequently jumbled ancient cultures. Long’s attractive models, dressed in exposing Greek robes and old Roman jewellery and surrounded by findings, may appear to us now to have taken liberties with his ideas. Pre- and post-photographic days, artists travelled alongside the expeditions to document the excavations. Later, as tourists arrived, painters imagined life in the ruins and completed their dreams in their studios in London for the Royal Academy. They were territorial in their topics, specialising in specific civilisations – Long had a monopoly on Babylon, yet in his paintings he frequently jumbled ancient cultures. Long’s attractive models, dressed in exposing Greek robes and old Roman jewellery and surrounded by findings, may appear to us now to have taken liberties with his ideas.