The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem
1857
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1966
Accession Number
66.640.2.9
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the ancient heart of Jerusalem with Francis Frith's *The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem* (1857), an albumen silver print from a glass negative that captures the iconic Dome of the Rock—known then as the Mosque of Omar—amid its urban surroundings. Frith, a pioneering British photographer, ventured into the Middle East during the mid-19th century, sacred sites under Ottoman rule with remarkable clarity. This image, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photographs collection (David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1966), offers visitors a window into a holy city layered with millennia of history. Fr...
About the Artist
Francis Frith · 1822–1898
Francis Frith (1822–1898) was born on 7 October 1822 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, into a prosperous Quaker merchant family as the second child and only son of Francis Frith Sr. and Alice Walker. Educated at Quaker schools including Ackworth and Camp Hill in Birmingham from around 1828 to 1838, he apprenticed in the cutlery trade before establishing himself as a wholesale grocer in Liverpool, suppl...