Hector Horeau, born in Versailles in 1801, had little luck as an architect. He won the competition for a covered market in Versailles in 1839 and for the design of the main building for the 1851 Great Exhibition of London (pictured above). Neither of these projects was realized with Horeau’s designs. The same happened with his 1849 proposals for Les Halles, the main market of Paris. He came up with a scheme for the construction of a railway tunnel under the Channel, connecting France and Britain (pictured below) – needless to say it never happened, not for another 150 years, anyway. None of his completed projects exists or can be identified. Horeau remains known only to architectural historians, who regard him as a pioneer in cast-iron, even if most of his work went unbuilt.
There is another body of work by Horeau, which is equally unheralded, although highly regarded by those who know about it. During the first part of his life he travelled extensively around Europe and also in Egypt. He was in Egypt in 1838, the same year David Roberts arrived, and like the Scot, Horeau explored the country with paintbrush in hand, producing a great many watercolours and sketches. Some of these were published in a portfolio with the snappy title Panorama d’Égypte et de Nubie, avec un Portrait de Méhémet-Ali et un Texte Orné de Vignettes. Rare copies of this sell for upwards of US$1,200 and, as far as I know, there have never been any reprints. Happily and quite amazingly, Horeau’s original watercolours survive and are held by the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, which has conserved, scanned and put them on line. Here are a few:
In all, the institute has some 130 paintings and they are magnificent. They show Egypt and its monuments as they would have been seen by early travellers, before they were fully excavated or cleared of debris. For my money, they have far more life and colour to them than Roberts’ far better known but bloodless drawings. To see more, go here.
