David Roberts was born at Stockbridge, Edinburgh on 24 October 1796. He was the son of shoemaker John Roberts and was one of five children, of which, only two survived to adulthood. He displayed his talents early, and his mother encouraged his efforts by allowing him to sketch in charcoal on the whitewashed kitchen wall. The education he received at a local ‘dame school’ was rudimentary. At the age of 10, he was apprenticed for seven years to the decorator Gavin Beugo. During that time, he studied art in the evenings. The work was demanding, lasting up to 15 hours a day in the summer months, but the training proved invaluable. Roberts soon mastered the techniques of marbling wood graining and trompe l’oeil panelling. After serving his time, Roberts was offered a contract as a scene painter with a travelling circus. He then spent the next 15 years designing sets for theatres throughout Britain, often in concert with William Clarkson Stanfield. Conditions at first were often tough, with sets having to be painted ‘in situ’ in time for rehearsals and performance the following day, when the painters were occasionally required to double up as actors. By the mid 1820s, however, the combined talents of Roberts and Stanfield had caught the theatregoing public’s imagination, and they could virtually dictate their own terms. Increasingly, Roberts became disenchanted with the theatre, an atmosphere characterised by petty jealousies and he was particularly upset when a rival destroyed his sets for Mozart’s Il Seraglio. At the same time, his marriage was disintegrating and he had to arrange for his wife, who succumbed to alcoholism, to be sent back to Scotland. Roberts began to plan a series of journeys which were to establish his reputation. The success of his sketches in Spain, published as lithographs in 1837, convinced him that there was a demand for images of exotic places, so he decided to travel to the Holy Land. Roberts wrote up his Eastern adventures in his journal, which commenced with the submerging of his hired felucca in order to drown the rats and bugs. Leaving Cairo with a Bedouin escort, he made for Jerusalem via the carved city of Petra. Desert quicksands, maurauding bandits, local insurrections, cholera outbreaks and even the dancing girls failed to separate him from his sketch pad. The journey ended at the classical city of Baalbec, in Syria, where, fighting a raging fever, he drew some of his finest pictures.  Roberts left Egypt in May 1839 and, after quarantine in Malta, arrived back in England in July. He had been away for eleven months, during which time he had gathered more than enough material to provide a rich source of inspiration for years to come. His oil paintings and engravings of Spanish views had been hugely successful, but their popularity was surpassed by the lithographs based on his sketches of the East, published between 1842 and 1849. A publisher was found, Louis Haghe, one of the leading lithographers of the day, engaged. More than £20,000 was subscribed for the first edition. They were highly fashionable, bringing accurate reproductions of the Bible lands into every Victorian drawing room. Roberts’s fame was assured and he numbered Queen Victoria and Prince Albert among his patrons. The acclaim established his reputation as a topographical artist. He was painted in Byronic splendour by Robert Scott Lauder and invited to join the committee for the Great Exhibition. In the autumn of 1839, Roberts moved to 7 Fitzroy Street, where he built a painting studio. For 30 years Roberts rarely failed to exhibit at the RA. His prolific output included many favourite views such as the chapel and castle at Roslin, and abbeys, churches and cathedrals. In the 1850s he visited Italy, and while standing on the Janiculum Hill above Rome, was struck by effect of the setting sun and produced his View of Rome from the Convent of St Onofrio, Mount Janiculum, which he presented to the RSA, as part of their collection for a new  National Gallery of Scotland. Towards the end of his life Roberts began a series of views of the Thames before the Embankment was built. He was occupied in finishing one of these, St Paul’s from Ludgate Hill at the time of his death. On 25 November 1864, he collapsed in Berners Street and died. His obituary in the Illustrated London News of 10 December 1864 described him as a ‘self-made artist who had progressed from poor journeyman house painter to a Royal Academician with a European reputation’.