Vue générale de Médinet-habou, prise de l'Est (Thèbes)
1849–50
Medium
Salted paper print from paper negative
Dimensions
Image: 6 7/16 × 8 1/16 in. (16.3 × 20.4 cm) Mount: 12 5/16 × 18 11/16 in. (31.2 × 47.5 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.376.79
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the sun-baked grandeur of ancient Egypt with Maxime Du Camp's *Vue générale de Médinetabou, prise de l'Est (Thèbes)*, a salted paper print from 1849–50. Captured during the French photographer's pioneering expedition along the Nile with writer Gustave Flaubert, this offers a sweeping vista of the Medinet Habu temple complex Thebes (modern Luxor). The mortuary temple of Ramesses dominates the scene, its colossal pylons and courtyards framed against a vast, arid landscape—a testament to pharaonic power etched in stone. As one of the earliest photographers to document Egypt's ruins, Du...
About the Artist
Maxime Du Camp · 1822–present
Maxime Du Camp (1822–1894) was a pioneering French photographer and writer whose adventurous spirit and technical innovation bridged literature and visual art during the mid-19th century. Born in Paris on February 8, 1822, to a prosperous family—his father a successful surgeon—Du Camp received a solid bourgeois education at the Collège Bourbon (now Lycée Condorcet), where he cultivated interests i...