View of Luxor (1854): Art, History and Details

View of Luxor (1854) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Beasley Greene (American, 1832–1856).

The work and its context

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

On the first of three trips to Egypt, John Beasley Greene created some 200 photographs. His work rarely documented favorite tourist sites in a conventionally descriptive manner; rather, he concentrated on poetic landscapes and archaeologically significant monuments. In this haunting photograph of Luxor, Greene's ability to depict expansive pictorial space is clearly evident. By surrounding the low, blocklike forms of the site's architecture with large vistas of vacant desert and sky, he emphasized a feeling of isolation and abandonment.

Object facts

• Title: View of Luxor
• Date: 1854
• Creator attribution: John Beasley Greene (American, 1832–1856)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from waxed paper negative
• Dimensions: Image: 23 x 30.5 cm (9 1/16 x 12 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1995.34

Collection credit

The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 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.