British School, 19th Century

The present work is an expansive landscape depicting Jerusalem from the South, the valley of Jehoshaphat and the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane. The Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are also visible. Other pioneering artists in the 19th Century painted the Holy City – drawn to the site that held such enormous significance for human history, culture and faith. British Orientalist artist David Roberts painted six large oils of Jerusalem viewed from the surrounding hills, based on his time in the city in 1839.  Frederic Edwin Church painted his view of the city in 1870 after spending a night camped on the Mount of Olives with his wife Isabel. Other monumental compositions were painted by Gustav Bauernfeind, Edward Lear and Jean-Léon Gérôme. However, the most comparable work to the present depiction is Thomas Seddon’s masterful work Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel, painted in 1854, now in the collection of the Tate.

When it was last sold at auction in 1980 this picture was catalogued as the work of George Hickin, an artist from Greenwich in London who exhibited at the British Institution and the Royal Academy from the 1850s to 1880. Hickin is best-known as a painter of poultry and no exhibits have been found that are similar to A View of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives and no evidence can be found in his known works to prove that he visited the Holy Land. The attribution to Hickin may be correct and may have been based on evidence now lost.