YCBA Collections Search

Cordova, or Córdoba in Spanish, was once the capital of Moorish Spain. By the tenth century, the city was revered as a New Athens for its opulence and learnign, attracting Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars, who worked alongside one another in an atmosphere of religious tolerance. the city's famous mosque was begun in A.D. 776 by the town's conqueror, Caliph Abd-er-Rahman I, and expanded gradually by his successors over the next two hundred years, until it stood as one of the largest mosques in the world, rivaled only by Mecca itself. When the Reconquista expelled the Arabs from Cordova in 1236, the mosque was converted into a Christian cathedral, although it forever remained known as the "Mezquita," the mosque. For Roberts, the mosque was one of the saving graces of the nineteenth-century city, a rare relic of its splendid medieval past. "Modern Cordoba is one of the most decayed and miserable citys in Spain," he lamented, "but to the Antequary [sic] and the Artist rich beyon measure." Roberts spent a considerable amount of time sketching in the mosque, eventually publishing an interior view in his lithographic volume Picturesque Sketches in Spain (1837). This watercolor of The Mosque at Cordova, however, was engraved by William Wallis for Thomas Roscoe's 1836 edition of Jenning's Landscape Annual, an illustrated account of the Andalusian region. Seventeen years later, it found its way into Théophile Gautier's illustrated travel book titled Wanderings in Spain. For Roscoe, contemplating southern Spain brought to mind visions of "oriental splendour," and the mosque at Cordova conformed to his Western idea of extravagant Eastern luxury. "The magnificence of the building may in some measure be conceived," he gushed, "when it is stated that there are no less than six hundred and thirty-two polished marble columns, of various colours, and some of them of the most costly description, employed in its construction." Despite the emphasis Roberts placed on these columns, and the polychrome marble veneers around the background arch, the principal focus is on the figures, whose presence seems to make the mosque a mere backdrop to their activities. This perhaps betrays the fifteen years Roberts had spent working for the London stage at the start of his career, painting backdrops and stage flats for Covent Garden and Drury Lane. The success of his topographical lithographs, however, allowed him to turn his bck on scene-painting forever.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, pp. 164-166, no. 71