Vue interrieure du couvent de sSe. Catherine/ View of the interrior of the convent of St. Catherine

Title

Vue interrieure du couvent de sSe. Catherine/ View of the interrior of the convent of St. Catherine

Description

View of the interrior of the convent of St. Catherine.

ca. 1830

Artist

Engelmann (1788-1839)

Godefroy Engelmann was a 19th-century Franco-German lithographer and chromolithographer. Godefroy Engelmann was born in 1788 in Mühlhausen, a small town near the France/Switzerland/Germany border. At the time of his birth Mulhouse was a free German republic associated with the Swiss Confederation, but was annexed by France 10 years later. He died in that same town in 1839, from a tumor in his neck. Engelmann trained in Switzerland and France at La Rochelle and Bordeaux, and he studied painting and sketching in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s atelier in Paris. In the summer of 1814 he travelled to Munich, Germany to study lithography, a German invention. The following spring, he founded La Société Lithotypique de Mulhouse. In June 1816 he opened a workshop in Paris. Engelmann is largely credited with bringing lithography to France and later, commercializing chromolithography. In 1837 he was granted an English patent for a process of chromolithography that provided consistently high-quality results. Throughout his life, he produced large numbers of prints, including numerous plates for Baron Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor's celebrated collection of lithographs, «Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France». Engelmann's Paris printing company, -Engelmann et Graf- was passed on to his son, Godefroy Engelmann II (born 1819), who carried on his father's work with the same high artistic quality until his own death in 1897.

Historical Description

The first archaeologically proven traces of an early or proto-Israelite settlement in the Mashrek region go back to the period between the 12th and 11th centuries BC. BC back. According to biblical tradition, Jerusalem was founded around 1000 BC. Conquered by David from the Jebusites and chosen as the capital of his great empire. The country subsequently became part of the Persian Empire, then the Empire of Alexander the Great, and finally the Empire of the Seleucids. The Maccabees revolt in 165 BC BC brought Israel once more state independence for about 100 years. 63 BC The time of Roman supremacy began. The Romans divided the area into two provinces: Syria in the north, Judea in the south. In the course of the Islamic expansion, the area came under Arab rule in 636. Since then, Palestine has been predominantly inhabited by Arabs. The crusaders ruled from 1099 to 1291 what they called the "Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem". This was followed by the Mamluks from 1291 to 1517 and then the Ottoman rule from 1517 to 1918. None of these authorities had planned their own administration for Palestine or viewed the area as an independent geographical unit. The region was also part of Syria for the Ottomans, probably going back to the Roman name Syria.