Luxor, Market Scene in front of a Mosque

It’s a 19th and early 20th century watercolour on cardboard painting.

Werner was born in Weimar and studied painting in Leipzig under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. From 1829 to 1831, he studied architecture in Munich, but returned to painting after that. He received a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he established a studio in Venice and stayed until the 1850s, establishing a reputation as a watercolour painter. He showed around Europe, with a focus on England, where he exhibited at the New Watercolour Society.

In 1856-1857, he travelled across Spain, then to Palestine and finally Egypt in 1862, returning to Egypt in 1864 for a lengthier stay. His watercolours in Jerusalem, where he was one of the few non-Muslims allowed to paint the interior of the Dome of the Rock, were particularly famous. In London, he published Jerusalem and the Holy Places, and in 1875, he published Carl Werner’s Nile Sketches, which included more watercolours from Egypt. Later in life, he travelled to Greece and Sicily before becoming a professor at the Leipzig Academy, where he died in 1894.