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Egypt

COMMENTARY

Gardner experienced the Egyptian landscape through a distinctly picturesque framework, attested by this watercolor depicting the Nile River at Esna.

Photo album.
Scrapbook photo.

Travel Album: Egypt and Sudan, Page 24, 1874 –1875.

Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, original watercolors, and pen-and-ink writings

Travel Album: Egypt and Sudan, Page 23, 1874 –1875.

Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, original watercolors, and pen-and-ink writings

Opposite is a fragment of a Coptic and Arabic manuscript containing an invocation and prayer, possibly created in the 1300s or 1400s. Gardner acquired this “from the old Empress Helena Convent,” likely the Monastery of Saint Ammonius and the Martyrs southwest of Esna. Published travel guides in the 1800s attributed many monasteries along the Nile to Helena, the mother of the Byzantine emperor Constantine who ruled from 306 to 337 CE and adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Gardner’s acquisition of this fragment may have given her a tangible connection to the pious empress.

—Alexander Brey, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art & Architecture, Wellesley College

View the full album in our online Collection database.

Her diary describes her many experiences during this trip, which included a voyage in a sailboat up the Nile.

 

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