Orientalist travelers sought to correct copies they knew without seeing originals

Evidence

Edward Lane, for example, was inspired to travel to Egypt after seeing the replicas and paintings on display at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. David Roberts, who had begun his career as a set designer at the Drury Lane Theatre, went to the Orient as an accomplished panorama painter and aspiring artist in search of the originals of theatre sets and panoramas he had already produced. Both Roberts and Lane were also inspired to visit Egypt by the famous Description de l’Egypte, the twenty-two volume work of French artists and scholars who had set up camp with the French army during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt, published by the French government between 1809 and 1822. And both of them set off declaring that their purpose was to correct the ‘inaccuracies’ of the Description, which somehow they knew to exist before even seeing the ‘original’ it claimed to represent. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Description de l’Egypte as an early state-sponsored knowledge project — parallels with Enlightenment encyclopedic projects in my knowledge base.
• SHARE: For a friend into print history: Lane and Roberts both knew the Description de l’Egypte’s errors before seeing the original it claimed to represent — a lovely clue about how textual authority precedes observation.
• CANDY: A Paris opera librettist named Théophile Gautier sailed to Egypt in 1869 just to see the real thing after visiting a World’s Fair pyramid replica — but the careful ‘double bind’ framing in the excerpt keeps it just above candy.