The engraving is one of twenty-one illustrations in The Tourist in Spain and Morocco, which comprises ten views of Spain and eleven of North Africa. Published in 1838, it was the last of four volumes dedicated to Spain in the Landscape Annuals series of engraved European views and texts, published by Jennings & Co in London. Overall, Roberts supplied Jennings with over eighty drawings for the volumes dedicated to Spain. The texts were written by Thomas Roscoe (1791-1871), a prolific writer, who had a special interest in Spain. He compiled several volumes of Spanish literature, such as The Spanish Novelists (1832) and translated Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi’s four volume Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe (1823).
The Tourist in Spain and Morocco was well received. It was praised by the press as “a highly interesting and very beautiful work, all the plates being from drawings by that exquisite artist, David Roberts, either originally made by him on the spot or from sketches by others”. The Literary Gazette regretted that it was the final volume dedicated to Spain in Jennings’s series, because “it will be difficult to select any other country so abounding with magnificent and picturesque subjects”.1
1 Press cuttings in David Roberts’s Record Book 1821-64, vol. 1, fol. 83r. Yale University.
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