Bartlett was a prolific topographical artist who travelled extensively in search of new and interesting subjects for his drawings. He visited North Africa and the Near East seven times, and made several other trips in Britain and Europe, as well as North America. Popular demand for travel books was high during the 1830s and 1840s, and Bartlett contributed illustrations to several of them, including about a dozen written by himself.
This watercolour resulted from his visit to Petra in November 1845, which he reached from Aqaba, having crossed Sinai from Cairo. It was engraved for Bartlett's account of his journey, Forty Days in the Desert.
The 'marvellous and romantic singularity of this wonderful region', as Bartlett described Petra in his book, inspired an unusually detailed watercolour that shows well his habitual use of pale coloured washes for the landscape, with ink outlines and denser pigment to give emphasis to the figures.
Petra (in Jordan), the legendary Nabataean capital, was rediscovered for the West by the Swiss explorer Jean Louis Burckhardt in 1812. Since then, its remote situation and curiously carved rock tombs have fascinated westerners. Several artists during the nineteenth century, including David Roberts, William Bartlett and Edward Lear, made the difficult and often dangerous journey to the ancient city