Francis Frith
The Pyramids of Dahshoor, from the East

Public Domain

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Artist Francis Frith English, 1822–1898

CultureEnglish

Titles

The Pyramids of Dahshoor, from the East

Date1857

MediumAlbumen silver print from glass negative

DimensionsImage: 14 3/8 × 18 15/16 in. (36.5 × 48.1 cm)
Sheet: 14 3/8 × 18 15/16 in. (36.5 × 48.1 cm)
Mount: 21 3/16 × 29 1/16 in. (53.8 × 73.8 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund, The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2004.458

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionIn 1856 Frith set out on the first of three trips to the Middle East, launching a highly successful career as a photographer and publisher of foreign topographic views. It is nothing short of a miracle that Frith succeeded in making photographs on this mammoth scale; the relatively new process utilizing glass negatives required him to transport his enormous camera, sheets of glass, and bottles of chemicals through the desert and to coat, expose, and develop his plates before the collodion emulsion dried. “With the thermometer at 110° in my tent,” wrote Frith, “the collodion actually boiled when poured upon the glass plate.” With local figures posed in the middle distance, Frith conveyed the vast expanse of the desert and the towering scale of the four-thousand-year-old pyramids at Dahshur.
ProvenanceChristie's, New York, 5/1983.

Bought by Manfred Heiting from Christie's, New York, on 5/8/1979.
Exhibition History"Egyptomania," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 18 March - 5 August 2012.

“A History of Photography II: Selections from the Museum's Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 17–July 19, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Marked below image, recto, centered: "The Pyramids of Dahshoor from the East"
Marked in pencil, verso, lower right: "VYC BC 866"

There is no evident signature.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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