Page 17 - Orient Collection

2. TEMPLE of ABU SIMBEL

Artist: Carl WERNER, German, (1808 - 1894)
Execution date (approximate): 1860
Téchnique: Oil on canvas, (Signed lower Left)
Measures: 190 x 122 cm.
Description: The Colossi of RAMSES II at Abu Simbel had remained unseen by European
eyes certainly since the Greco-Roman period, even possibly before and from around 600
BC .when the Greeks marched south to Ethiopia. Some 400 years later, lower Nubia began
to fade and the sands of the western desert then started to invade the Great Temple.
Then soon, the sands engulfed the facade. Carl WERNER and other painters in the 19th
century arrived by boat on the Nile, saw the four colossal statues of Ramses II, and perhaps
the most extraordinary ancient ruins in Egypt after the Great Pyramids.
He was among the first European in a thousand years and more to do so.

Exhibitions
Royal Academy of Arts in London, in 1877, Dictionary of Contributors and their work from
its foundation in 1769 to 1904,Vol. VIII, p.211.
De Delacroix A Kandinsky; L’orientalisme En Europe.
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 15.10.2010 - 09.01.2011.
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, München 28.01.2011 - 01.05.2011.
Musées des Beaux-Arts de Marseilles, 27.05.2011 - 28.08.2011.
(Reunion des Musées Nationaux du France, rmn)

Publications
• Les Orientalistes des écoles Allemandes et Autrichienes, p.171.
Editions ACR.
• L’Orientalisme De Delacroix A Kandinsky, p.235.

Biography
Born in Weimar, Werner studied painting under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld in Leipzig.
He switched to studying architecture in Munich from 1829 to 1831, but thereafter returned
to painting. He won a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he ended up founding a studio in
Venice and remaining until the 1850s, making a name for himself as a watercolor painter.
He exhibited around Europe, in particular traveling often to England, where he exhibited
at the New Watercolour Society.
He traveled through Spain in 1856 and 1857, and then in Egypt and Palestine from 1862
to 1864. Particularly notable were his watercolors in Jerusalem, where he was one of the
few non-Muslims able to gain access to paint the interior of the Dome of the Rock. He
published some watercolors from this trip in 1875 as Carl Werner’s Nile Sketches. He later
traveled to Greece and Sicily, and became a professor at the Leipzig Academy, dying in
Leipzig in 1894.

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