On the Way between Old and New Cairo, Citadel Mosque of Mohammed Ali, and Tombs of the Mamelukes

Date Created: 1872

Rights: Gift of George Foster Peabody

Medium: Oil on canvas

Signed: Signed lower left: "Louis C. Tiffany"

Dimensions: 41 3/8 x 68 1/16 in. (105.1 x 172.9 cm)

Museum: Brooklyn Museum

Collection: American Art

Late nineteenth-century European and American landscape painters often painted distant places in order to offer audiences something intriguingly unfamiliar. Louis Comfort Tiffany here recorded a view of relatively “modern” Egyptian monuments: the mosque of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, often called the Alabaster Mosque (built 1824–57); and the nearby tombs of the sultans of Egypt’s Baharide Mamluk dynasty (1250–1376). Tiffany based this work on photographs he made in 1871, just two years after the completion of the Suez Canal had stimulated new interest in Egypt and the Middle East.