This watercolour by Edward Lear, executed on 3 January 1854, shows traditional Egyptian, lateen-rigged cargo vessels passing along the Nile beneath a craggy cliff and various palm trees under a cloudless sky.

By the time of his second visit to Egypt, Lear had developed his individual style, which, despite its sense of detailed observation, mostly emphasizes sensitive colouring and rather swooping pencil lines. Lear tended to scribble notes onto the image clearly marking them as sketches, including descriptive comments on staffage figures or vegetation, but also on colour hues.

This view shows the river at one of its bends. To the right, the composition opens into the distance with one of the vessels sailing towards the spectator. In the left foreground the river runs parallel to the phalanx of palm trees on the opposite shore. On the deck of the large ship in the left half of the image a single figure stands as if contemplating the typical Egyptian landscape. The colours are restricted to yellows, ochres, greens and browns. Lear identifies the location as Geiada. The scene appears to be taken from aboard another ship while travelling along in the middle of the stream.

Although Lear worked in the tradition of British topographical art, his drawings leave behind its documentary attitude, which recorded landscape and geographical features for the benefit of their antiquarian and natural literary associations. Lear conveys the countryside with a mysterious and exotic character, rather than attempting to re-establish the historical and particularly biblical topography which had drawn other travellers to the Near and Middle East. It is mostly the luminous colours in their own right which are intended to trigger poetical sentiment in the beholder and characterize the scene as picturesque.

In the watercolour the vessel signifies present life and activity, but with the beginnings of modern tourism in the region the artist’s emphasis on its traditional build also conveys the romanticized impression of timelessness, equating the ‘exotic’ and ‘oriental’ present with the distant past.