Émile Prisse d'Avennes' drawings of the Nile Valley and the construction of Islamic Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century illustrated travel album

Starting with early nineteenth-century illustrated albums on Egypt, such as La Description de l’Égypte (1809-22), made by a team of scientists and engineers who accompanied Napoleon’s 1978 campaign to Egypt, topographical illustrations were inscribed in many nineteenth-century albums that pictured both ancient and modern Egypt for the European public. Later mid-century publications were also influenced by the art market of the time and responded to the public demand for more colorful ethnographic depictions of oriental life, which was a result of more general exposure to such paintings in countries, such as France and Britain, as well as the newly popularized bourgeois culture of travel. This paper will look closely at the visual archive of the French Egyptologist Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-79) stored today at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, particularly Prisse d’Avennes’ drawings of modern Egypt that also served for the preparation of his illustrated luxury album on Islamic Egypt, entitled Oriental album: characters, costumes, and modes of life, in the valley of the Nile (London: Madden, 1848). By doing so, this paper will try to understand Prisse d’Avennes’ methods of recording information in Egypt and his strategies for conveying the image of this country for the European public later at home. These strategies had to take into account multiple demands placed on orientalist books which asked at once for images that were appealing and correct, but also innovative in interpretation, as well as possibly responded to previous images inscribed in works, such as La Description de l’Égypte.