Born in Basel in 1813, Johann Frey worked in Paris and Munich before settling in Rome in 1835. Frey began his career as a traditional landscape artist, painting around the Roman campagna and Naples in a gently Romantic style common to many of his northern European contemporaries.

However, a trip to Tunisia in 1840, and to Egypt in 1842, where he spent nearly a whole year accompanying an expedition by the Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius, evinced from the artist a far more original response. He produced during both trips a large number of drawings, which resulted in paintings ranging from highly Romantic canvases, which emphasized the emptiness and dangers of the desert, to more topographi...