Gate of the Serranos. Valencia 

Gate of the Serranos. Valencia  

James Baylis Allan after David Roberts, 1838 

Steel engraving 

The view captures the imposing Serranos Gate with its polygonal towers from below and at an angle. Built in the late fourteenth century as part of Valencia’s defensive walls, the gate served as the northwestern entry point for the road to the district of Els Serrans. The monument’s scale and splendour are accentuated by the ceremonial entry of uniformed men on horseback, followed by a line of figures on foot. Spectators watch from the balcony, adorned with a banner. Below, on the right, two uniformed men on horseback stand by, while a group of cloaked men stand near the wall, and two women sit on the ground. On the left, a crowd of figures, some with lances and flags, gather on the left. In the foreground, a man urges a woman and her child forward to make space for the parade, while a barking dog adds liveliness to the scene.   

David Roberts did not visit Valencia during his 1832-1833 Spanish tour. He based this image on a sketch by Lieutenant Edridge of the Royal Artillery. Roberts likely enhanced the original on-site sketch for a more picturesque effect. He also created a large watercolour version of the same scene, now in the Government Art Collection at Lancaster House, London.    

 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 on 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interesting and very beautiful work, all the plates being from drawings by that exquisite artist, David Roberts, either originally made by him on the spot or from sketches by others’.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’ (press cuttings in David Roberts’s Record Book 1821-64, vol. 1, fol. 83r. Yale University).   

Title: Gate of the Serrano’s. Valencia.  

Author/Artist: James Baylis Allen (1803–1876, engraver) after a drawing by David Roberts (1796-1864). 

Technique and Material:  Steel engraving, paper. 

Size: 94 x 122 mm (image). 

Published: Plate [8] from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain and Morocco, London: Robert Jennings & Co, 1838, facing page 150.  

Date: 1838.  

Marks and Inscriptions: lower edge, left: ‘Drawn by D. Roberts, from a sketch by Lieut. Edridge of the Royal Artillery’; centre: title as above / ‘Published Octr 28 1837, by Robert Jennings & Co. 62, Cheapside’; right: ‘Engraved by James B. Allen’.  

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.