Thebes, The Colossi of Memnon (1870s): Art, History and Details

Thebes, The Colossi of Memnon (1870s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri Béchard (French).

The work and its context

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

As more photographers shot the same monuments,depictions became formulaic.Numerous photographers produced almost identical images,as demonstrated in these two views of the Colossi of Memnon. Shot from different sides but about the same distance, both images employ an angled view and use Egyptian servants and guides as local color and indexes of scale. Captions and artists’ signatures were often written in reverse on the negatives so that they would automatically become part of each print. Sometimes, as in the Beato image, the artist or his assistant was care less.

Object facts

• Title: Thebes, The Colossi of Memnon
• Date: 1870s
• Creator attribution: Henri Béchard (French)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 36 x 26.9 cm (14 3/16 x 10 9/16 in.); Paper: 36 x 26.9 cm (14 3/16 x 10 9/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2006.119

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Whitehill Art Purchase Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vandenbeusch, Marie, Aude Semat, and Margaret Maitland. Pharaoh: King of Ancient Egypt. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art ; London : The British Museum, 2016.

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.