Al Khazneh (picture)

During the nineteen months of traveling around the Old World , Frederick Church was most impressed by the pilgrimage to the Middle East, and especially the meeting with Petra . For the American artist, who was an ardent supporter of the Protestant church, the ancient city personified the biblical story of Idumea . While in Petra directly, Frederick Church kept a diary, writing down his vivid impressions of the trip and the unique religious experience that he gained. One of these descriptions formed the basis of Church’s painting “ Al-Khazneh ” of 1874, where he describes his first meeting with an ancient temple:

The landscape was becoming more and more wonderful and more wonderful, and now we were surrounded by walls of majestic cliffs that formed a narrow path. We followed this winding road until the famous Al-Khazneh appeared before our eyes. This wonderful temple, whose view was partially overlapped by a huge cliff, the color of which was black with some olive tint, except in those places where it was relatively recently damaged. Gray colors of various shades and surprisingly warm tones were superimposed on top of each other in layers. The rock, as you can see at first glance, is full of a beautiful reddish-somon color - which some travelers mistakenly call pink. The temple has a light shade, highly refined, given its enormous size. There are, of course, various variations, including a beautiful clove shade and gray-blue bricks, appearing in groups in several places. The combined effect for the unprepared eye is the uniform color of the temple. It is so wonderful to see such a delightful and light color blazing through the black arches of frightening cliffs, and the effect is enhanced after you notice that the temple is rich in sculptural ornamentation that shines as if it had its own inner light. Some sculptures look so sharp that they seem to be barely finished. The main arch is also beautiful and very richly decorated. In the ornament on the edges, I noticed clusters of grapes and pomegranate with the corresponding foliage. Eagles were carved in the corners, as well as some other animals, probably lions. We followed Sik - a narrow crack, or crevice - that went straight to Al Khazneh - it was so narrow that we could hardly walk along it without soaking our feet in a small stream flowing along the stone bottom ... I made some quick sketches in these environs, including one oil, which depicts part of Al-Khazneh " ^[1]

This picture is strongly knocked out of all the work of the American artist due to a very unusual "closed" composition, built in a vertical format, forming a kind of very contrasting dark curtain from a rocky gorge on both sides of the picture. At the same time, despite the fact that most of this picture is in darkness, it is one of the most picturesque easel paintings depicting landscapes of the Middle East in the work of an American artist. The bright colors described by Church in the diary play on the surface of the central part of this work - there is also a complex somone color of the rock, and gray-blue shades that appear in places, and various gray shades with an admixture of pinkish color - “the color of cloves”. On the whole, due to Church’s artistic approach, the central part of the picture gives the viewer the impression that the temple in the central part of the picture itself emits light - this gives the work a special mystical mood.

It is also worth highlighting the artist’s thorough elaboration of details on the canvas, which is reflected in the image of the architectural elements of the temple.

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  Sketch of Al Khazneh. 1868
  Graphite paper. 37.8 x 27.6 cm.
  Cooper Havit National Design Museum, New York

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  Ad-dair. 1868
  Oil on paper. 32.7x51.12 cm.
  Cooper Havit National Design Museum, New York

• Frederick Edwin Church
• List of works by Frederick Edwin Church