Vue générale des Ruines du Rhamesseum, à Thèbes (Tombeau d'Osymandian)
May 9, 1850
Medium
Salted paper print from paper negative
Dimensions
Image: 5 11/16 × 8 11/16 in. (14.5 × 22 cm) Mount: 12 5/16 × 18 11/16 in. (31.2 × 47.5 cm) Frame: 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 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
2005.100.376.72
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the sun-baked grandeur of ancient Egypt with Maxime Du Camp *Vue générale des Ruines Rhamesseum, à Thèbes (Tom d'Osymandian)*, a salted paper print captured on May 9, 1850. This poignant photograph offers a sweeping view of the Ramesseum, theuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II in Thebes (modern Luxor). Towering columns and crumbling walls evoke the passage of millennia, framing the site's majestic decay against a vast, open landscape. Du Camp, a French photographer and writer, documented these ruins during his 1849–1850 journey through Egypt alongside Gustave Flaubert. As one of the ...
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...