This watercolour by Edward Lear, executed on 3 January 1854, shows a large lateen-rigged vessel passing along the Nile with the steep bank of the river rising in the background. Single palm trees and two small buildings with white domes accentuate the barren landscape and the 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. This view is constructed along a narrow horizontal format emphasising the slow flow of the river and accentuated by the stark verticals of the palm trees to the left and the diagonally rising hill-top on the right which is crowned by one of the domed buildings. Its colours are restricted to yellows, ochres, and browns. Lear does not specify the exact location. 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.