Fallen Statue at the Ramesseum, Thebes (1857): Art, History and Details

Fallen Statue at the Ramesseum, Thebes (1857) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francis Frith (British, 1822–1898).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Overcoming both physical dangers and technical difficulties, Francis Frith traveled to obscure regions of the world to capture exotic images for an eager Victorian audience. Taken on the second of three trips to Egypt, this photograph was created with a mammoth plate (typically an 18-x-22-inch glass negative), which enabled the artist to capture the smallest details of a scene. Here Frith conveyed the monumentality of the ancient Egyptian sculpture by including members of his expedition in the picture. The image was published in an album containing 20 mammoth-plate views, the only published volume of Frith's large photographs and one of the first devoted to large-scale prints.

Object facts

• Title: Fallen Statue at the Ramesseum, Thebes
• Date: 1857
• Creator attribution: Francis Frith (British, 1822–1898)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 38.3 x 48.2 cm (15 1/16 x 19 in.); Matted: 61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.236

A detail from the museum

Francis Frith was 17 years old when photography was discovered and almost 30 when he became a photographer.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38-79.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 36 no. 10, December 1996

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.