William Page

Pen and grey ink over graphite on two sheets of grey paper, joined

43.7 x 114.6 cm

This drawing, made with the aid of a camera obscura, shows the extent to which modern houses covered the Acropolis in 1819. Page commented on the juxtaposition of ancient and modern Athens in an informative inscription on the reverse of a drawing of the Acropolis in a private collection in Athens: A ramble though Athens in any direction, must be pursued, through a confused assemblage of well - built houses of recent construction, of miserable houses raised among the ruins of former habitations, and of ruined churches and houses . . . In the midst of the latter you may frequently observe some half-buried column or massive fragment of an antique wall or foundation thrown in to bolder relief by the mean and insignificant proportions of the remains. This anomalous [combination] of two epochs, of the past with the present, so widely different from both, is a peculiarity which will a wake the imagination of the least speculative. William Gell, the artist and antiquarian, noted that the weak mud brick construction of the houses caused seventeen houses to collapse during rain storms between 1805 and 1821.

In this drawing the Erectheion, the Ionic temple of Athena Polias, can be seen to the left, with the conical hill of Lykabettos to its left.

Simone Pomardi, Edward Dodwell’s companion in Greece in 1805–1806, drew a similar view from behind the Gate of the Propylaea, which is just behind the columns at the front of the present drawing.