This watercolour by Edward Lear, executed on 1 January 1854, portrays shipping on the Nile.

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 is broken up into three bands each of them constructed along a narrow horizontal format with craggy mountain ranges and groups of palm trees on the far bank of the river. The colours are restricted to yellows, ochres, and browns and the eight gyassis and nuggers on the reflecting water appear almost in silhouette. Lear does not specify the exact locations. Whereas the scene in the top tier seems to be taken from the sandy shore in the foreground with two Egyptians leaning on staffs to the left, the scenes below could have been drawn aboard 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 historical associations. If, as in the case of his Egyptian images, the past is alluded to, Lear conveys it 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.