About this work
Three monumental facades, each carved directly into the rose-red sandstone cliffs of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra, fill the horizontal span of this intimate yet commanding work. The composition is deeply bathed in rose-red — not only the sandstone itself, but the sky and the land from which it rises.
Church shows these three relics in a rugged matrix of living rock and crumbled rubble — the columned Urn Tomb anchoring the scene with its dramatic terraced forecourt, the Silk Tomb nestled beside it, and the Corinthian Tomb's elaborately carved upper register catching the warm desert light above. The work is oil on paper mounted to canvas, measuring 13 x 20⅛ inches — small in scale but saturated with chromatic intensity and the gravity of millennia.
Church and his traveling party explored the "lost city" of Petra on February 24th and 25th, 1868, during what was a transformative period in his life and career. In the autumn of 1867, Frederic and Isabel Church had embarked on an 18-month trip to Europe and the Middle East to see the ruins left by ancient civilizations, making lengthy stays in Rome, Beirut, and Jerusalem before Church arranged a camel-caravan to Petra.
While Church is usually thought of as a painter of breathtaking Romantic views of pristine nature, in the middle and later parts of his career he devoted himself to depicting the man-made relics of the ancient world at various locations in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Petra works represent a pivotal hinge in that transition. The finished painting hangs at Olana, where it was given by Church to his wife Isabel — a room whose decoration was itself inspired by their travels, including the painted pseudo-Arabic inscriptions that run throughout the space.
This is a painting for rooms that reward stillness. Its warm ochres and rose tones read well in spaces with natural light that shifts through the day — a study, a reading room, or a library with warm-toned walls where the ancient world feels like a living reference point rather than a relic. Through Church's poetic brush, the architectural ruins of the ancient world become poignant remains of lost civilizations. It speaks directly to the historically curious, the well-traveled, and those drawn to the quieter registers of Church's genius — not the theatrical ten-foot canvases, but the on-the-ground encounter, all heat and sandstone and the uncanny persistence of human making against geological time.
