Egyptian Landscape

This painting shows a monument on Philae Island in Egypt known as Trajan’s Kiosk, or Pharaoh’s Bed, which was built for the Roman emperor Trajan. During the nineteenth century, magazines such as Harper’s New Monthly often published engravings of foreign monuments and landscapes with articles on travel. Charles McIlhenney, like many other artists, may have painted ideal landscapes of distant countries based on these illustrations.