AN ENGLISH CUBIST

WILLIAM ROBERTS:

The Khamsin

Illustration © The Estate of John David Roberts. Reproduced with the permission of the William Roberts Society. Catalogue information based on the catalogue raisonné by David Cleall. For this and full details of the exhibitions cited, see the links below. Any auction prices quoted may not include all fees and taxes, such as VAT and Artist's Resale Right charges.
Images scanned from the Sedgwick copy of the 1926 Seven Pillars of Wisdom are used by courtesy of Mrs J. Sedgwick and are not to be further reproduced except by permission.

The Khamsin, 1925–6
Pen and ink, 28.5 cm x 20 cm

Tailpiece drawing for Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: 'It was a breathless wind, with the furnace taste sometimes known in Egypt when a khamsin came; and, as the day went on and the sun rose in the sky it grew stronger, more filled with the dust of the Nefudh, the great sand desert of Northern Arabia, close by us over there, but invisible through the haze. By noon it blew a half-gale, so dry that our shrivelled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped; while our eyelids, gone granular, seemed to creep back and bare our shrinking eyes. The Arabs drew their head-clothes tightly across their noses, and pulled the brow folds forward like vizors with only a narrow, loose-flapping slit of vision' (ch. 42).
PROVENANCE: Bayard L. Kilgour Jr > Houghton Library, Harvard University (1966, MS Eng 1653, no. 20)
EXHIBITION HISTORY: Leicester Galleries (1) 1927