JERUSALEM, ISRAEL.- Lady Alice Oliphant, painter and photographer, came to the Holy Land with her husband Sir Laurence Oliphant in 1882, and lived there until her death in 1886. It was during this period that the Holy Land experienced an upsurge in tourism by travelers whose main interest was the Bible, as well as the geography and archaeology of the region. European Realist and Romanticist artists, attracted by the climate and living conditions, also came to document the views and landscapes, sacred sites, and local inhabitants of the Holy Land. The tourists, amongst them many women, produced a rich crop of illustrated travel books, some of which achieved great popularity; others never reached the public. Most of the works shown in the exhibition are watercolors, done in the best English tradition. Photography, used even then to record the sights of the Holy Land, is also represented.
Lady Alice was born in 1846 to Henry Styleman Le Strange and his wife Jamesina. Reared on a European education and graced with a charming and charismatic personality, she also demonstrated great talent in music and languages. She met Sir Laurence Oliphant, born in Capetown and seventeen years her senior, in Paris. Sir Laurence, writer, traveler, diplomat, and mystic, was then working as a war correspondent for The Times in London. He was also a sympathist of the Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement.
The Oliphants arrived in Palestine in October 1882 and settled in the German Templars colony in Haifa, where they lived in a commune with a group of friends from England - all of them gentiles. Naphtali Herz Imber, poet and author of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah, joined them for a short period, serving as Sir Laurence’s Hebrew secretary. The group lived in the communal house in Haifa during the winter months, while summers were spent in the Druze village of Daliat el Carmel, where close ties were made with the local population. During this period Oliphant published a series of sixty-six articles for the New York Sun, including descriptions and drawings of life in Palestine. The illustrations, some of them by Lady Alice, were eventually published in the book Haifa - or Life in Modern Palestine.
In November 1885, Jamesina Waller, Lady Alice’s sister and a talented artist in her own right, came to Palestine with her husband Adolphus. Together with the Oliphants they embarked on a horseback tour of the north, with the sisters painting the landscapes encountered on the way. On their return to Daliat el Carmel, Lady Alice fell ill with a fever and passed away on January 2, 1886 at the age of forty.
Hundreds of mourners attended her funeral, conducted in pouring rain. The works shown in the exhibition are those of the artists Alice Oliphant, Stanley Inchbold, Ellis Tristram, Hilda May Gordon, P. G. Jobson, Henry Andrew Harper, G. H. Hartley, Jamesina Waller, Peter Peterson Toft, Charles H. Mackie, Elizabeth H. Mitchell, P. A. F. Stephenson, John Fulleylove, and other less known artists. Most of the works come from a private collection, with a selected number have been kindly lent by The National Maritime Museum in Haifa.
