Church of San Miguel Xeres

Church of San Miguel Xeres  

Thomas Shotter Boys after David Roberts, 1837 

Hand-coloured lithograph 

David Roberts went to Jerez in late April or early May 1833, towards the end of his tour through Spain, which had begun in October 1832 and taken him from Irún via Vitoria and Burgos to Madrid, and from there to Córdoba, Granada, Málaga, Tangier, Gibraltar, and Cádiz. He spent several days sketching in Jerez in April or early May 1833. He observed that the town was similar to other Andalusian towns in its mixture of Roman, Islamic and Christian architecture. He admired its churches, the Alcázar, and the city walls, and also enjoyed visiting the ‘immense wine cellars and tasting sherries in perfection’.1 From Jerez, Roberts went to Seville, the capital of Andalucía, where he remained until mid-September, when he decided to return to London due to an outbreak of cholera. 

This lithograph depicts a partial view of the richly decorated interior of the Church of San Miguel, which was built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and blends Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque details. On the left, a priest lectures from a pulpit, groups of men and women are below, standing or sitting on the ground. A similar view was engraved by Thomas Higham for Thomas Roscoe’s The Tourist in Spain. Andalusia (1836, facing p. 226). Both the lithograph and the engraving relate to earlier views of the same subject, including a watercolour drawing, created in 1834, which is in the British Museum (1900,0824.532), a watercolour, ca. 1836 (private collection), and the earlier on-the-spot drawing, dated 29 April 1833 (with Christie’s, 2 July 2013, lot 86). In 1842, Roberts also exhibited an oil painting of the same subject at the Royal Academy.  

Notes:  

1 Letter from Roberts to David Ramsay Hay, Seville, 4 May 1833, National Library of Scotland. 

Title: Church of San Miguel Xeres.  

Author/Artist: Thomas Shotter Boys (1803-1874, lithographer) after a drawing by David Roberts. (1796-1864, artist).  

Technique and Material: Hand-coloured lithograph, paper.  

Size: 385 x 275 mm (image), 550 x 370 mm (page).  

Published: Plate 4 from David Roberts, Picturesque sketches in Spain taken during the years 1832 & 1833. London: Hodgson & Graves, 1837.  

Date: 1837. 

Marks and Inscriptions: bottom left: ‘Church of San Miguel Xeres’. 

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.