Caroline Emily Gray Hill Bedouins on Camels, Gulf of Suez

An original late 19th-century watercolour painting, Caroline Emily Gray Hill, Bedouins on Camels, Gulf of Suez.

A fantastic large watercolour by artist, traveller and photographer Lady Caroline Emily Gray Hill (1843–1924). Two small bedouin camel riders make a trail through a vast expanse of uninhabited desert in the Gulf of Suez, on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Caroline Emily Gray Hill was a fascinating figure whose work has only recently begun to be appreciated. This watercolour exemplifies her painting style and her romanticised love for the Near East: its radiant translucent washes capture the sharp desert light and the diminutive figures communicate the landscape's majestic sense of scale.

Caroline Emily Gray Hill was born in Tottenham, the daughter of George Drake Hardy. She married the solicitor Sir John Edward Gray Hill and the couple were both fascinated by stories of the Holy Land. In 1888 they made their first visit, during which they fell in love with Palestine. They went on to return each year for the next quarter-century and they built a house on Mount Scopus, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Caroline Emily Gray Hill was a talented painter and her art captured her love for the region. She was enchanted by all that was different from gloomy England: the colours, the light, the endless stretches of yellow. The couple disliked urban Jerusalem and instead focused on the surrounding desert landscapes and their bedouin travellers. Travelling across this region in the late 1800s was fraught with danger and Gray-Hill experienced kidnap, ransom and arrest whilst painting the landscape. John Edward Gray Hill wrote a book about their experiences, 'With the Bedouin' (1891) and Caroline paintings and photographs were used as illustrations, but as was typical for the time, her work went almost uncredited. When John died suddenly in 1914, Caroline never returned to the Middle East, remaining at their home at Mere Hall, Birkenhead near Liverpool, until her death in 1924.

In 1914, Arthur Ruppin, head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization, purchased the Hills' large home at Mount Scopus for the purpose of building a university, which became the first piece of ground for the Jewish university in Jerusalem. Whilst John Hill's books fell into obscurity, Caroline Hill's work has experienced a recent renaissance, with an exhibition of her work in 2002 at Ticho House in Jerusalem, titled 'The Lady and the Desert', and a 2011 exhibition at the Victoria Gallery & Museum at the University of Liverpool, titled 'Desert Impressions: Journeys of a Victorian Lady'. A body of Hill's work is in the collection of the Victoria Gallery & Museum at the University of Liverpool.

On board.