Watercolour, `Kouyunjick'. On the back, View of the Castle and part of the Town of Bitlis, 1849-1850, by Frederick Charles Cooper

Watercolour drawing

Purchased with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, Shell International and the Friends of the V&A

On Kuyunjik see Layard, 1853, p.76 et passim and cf. engraving titled The Great Mound of Kouyunjik, opposite Mosul, in J. Bonomi, Nineveh And Its Palaces, 3rd edn, 1869, facing p.2. On Bitlis (eastern Turkey) see Layard, 1853, pp.35-7.
SD252-269 relate to Layard's second expedition to excavate the ruins of ancient Nineveh in 1849-51: see his Discoveries in the ruins of Nineveh And Babylon; with travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert: being the result of a second expedition undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1853.
Cooper's diary for January-August 1850 was in the possession of a descendant, Mrs Irene Lyon Coldstream: see photocopy in the Searight Archive. Other drawings from this expedition are in the BM, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. An oil, Scene from the Excavations at Nineveh, 1852, was formerly with the Mathaf Gallery, London.
See also Layard, Sir Austen Henry, SD559. Layard, 1853; G. Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh, 1963; British Museum, London, Layard and his Successors: Assyrian
Explorations and Discovery in the XIXth Century, 1963 (exh.cat.); J. Reade, Assyrian Sculpture, BM, 1980; Information from Frederick N. Bohrer, Irene Lyon Coldstream and Dr. Julian Reade: see Searight Archive.

SD.258