Drawing, `Yezidis of the Sinjar', by Frederick Charles Cooper

Drawing

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

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The Yezidi are a religious sect inhabiting south-east Turkey and northern Iraq. See also Layard 1853, Ch. XI., and compare the engraving on page 201.
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.265:2