The Colossus and the Sphinx: Two Cartographies of Africa in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This article compares G. F. Watts’s unfinished portrait of the mining magnate and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1898) with the artist’s earlier “portrait” of the Sphinx at Giza (1887). When he invoked this comparison, Rhodes revealed a clash between both men’s cartographies of the British empire. While Rhodes wished to see the entire African continent under British rule “from Cape Town to Cairo,” Watts found in Egypt an orientalist aesthetics that left the artist conflicted about the British empire’s presence there. For Watts, this disjuncture between Orientalism and imperialism elucidated the totality and fragility of the British empire.