Inscribed across the top:

William Henry Brooke (1772–1860) was an artist and illustrator who left an unfulfilling career in banking to train under the portrait painter Samuel Drummond.[1]

A label on the reverse of the sketches incorrectly identifies them as drawings taken from the album of sketches for James Justinian Morier’s Journey through Persia and Asia Minor to Constantinople in the years 1808–1809. They are, in fact, preliminary sketches for woodcuts to illustrate James Silk Buckingham’s 1830 book Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia. A prolific travel writer, Buckingham wrote several volumes on his journey overland to India. This volume picks up in Bagdad in 1828 and ends in the port of Muscat. The majority of the illustrations in the book come from Buckingham’s original sketches, with Brooke transferring them to wood before a separate engraver finished the job.

The sketch of Ras al Khaimah illustrates the heading of chapter 8, vol. II: ‘The Chief Port of the Wahabee Pirates’.[2] The illustration of Muscat, the focus of chapter 9, seems to have been dropped in favour of an engraving from a painting by ‘[William Frederick] Witherington, after a sketch of Colonel [John] Johnson, of the Bombay Engineers’.3 The names in pencil in the top righthand corner of each sketch, Williams and White, refer to the intended engraver. According to the list of figures, a Williams and a White did work as engravers on this project, but the sketch of Ras al Khaimah was engraved by a Slader.

Several watercolours by William Henry Brooke for the same publication are held in the British Museum, London. A sketch of the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, Iran (no. 2014,6012.3) is labelled no. 16; a sketch of Kazerun, Iran (no. 2014,6012.2), is labelled no. 19; and a view of Aqar Quf, Iraq (no. 1957,0221.6), is labelled no. 21.

[1] Mallalieu, H. L. The Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists up to 1920, vol. 1. Woodbridge: The Antique Collector’s Club, 1986 (2nd edition), p. 54.

[2] Buckingham, James Silk. Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia: Including a Journey from Bagdad to Mount Zagros, to Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, Researches in Ispahan and the Ruins of Persepolis, vol. 2. London: Colburn, 1830, Chapter VIII, p. 338. Accessed online via https://archive.org/details/travelsinassyria02buckuoft on 11.12.25.

[3] Ibid., p. 392.